


True Love Will Follow You Forever

by balmandbitterness



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Domesticity, Gen, M/M, Mosaic Timeline, Princess Bride AU, but don’t worry i am as always bringing the emotion in between the wacky hijinx, have you ever heard of a canon compliant au? well you have now, he's the one who said he did a dread pirate roberts, it sounds silly because it is!, it’s a parody in that i am a parody of myself, listen here is the actual deal: this is quentin's princess bride self insert fanfiction, really this is quentin23’s fault. i cannot be held responsible, sort of? it’s maybe more like a parody?? like a really deeply loving parody
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-03-29 16:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19024078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balmandbitterness/pseuds/balmandbitterness
Summary: “You know, back on Earth, there’s a story we tell to sick children.”“A story?” Teddy curls up with his back against the pillows and pulls his knees up to his chest. “What kind of story?”Dad hums, thinking. “Oh, it’s got a little of everything, really. There’s fighting and friendship, and chases and escapes, and revenge and true love and magic. Does that sound okay?”Teddy closes his eyes, readying himself to listen. “Yeah, I think it sounds good.”~Teddy isn't feeling well. Quentin puts a personal spin on an Earth classic.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, it happened, folks. consider this chapter a prologue.

Rain patters softly against the thatched roof, rolls off in rivulets that stream past the window to land in fat drops in the dirt, wells up in little channels between the tiles of the mosaic outside. Teddy’s been watching it fall for ages, at a loss for anything better to do. Usually when the weather confines him to the cottage he preoccupies himself with one of the books from his dad’s shelf, but he’s a few days into a miserable cold and staring at the words on the pages for too long makes his head swim. So he lies in bed, and he watches the rain. 

Papa’s gone into town despite the downpour to get a bottle of medicine from Miss Asterid’s Apothecary and Dad is busy heating up a bowl of the chicken soup from last night. It’s only a head cold, and Teddy knows he’ll be fine in a few days, but he also knows he can’t stop them worrying. They fuss and fret every time he’s sick. They've done so nearly as long as he can remember. Ever since Mom. 

Outside, the rain overflows its grid of little rivers and swells above the surface of the tiles. 

“It’ll pass soon,” says Dad. He smiles a tired smile and sets a steaming bowl of soup on the nightstand. “Never lasts too long this time of year. We’ll all be sitting out in the sun by next week.”

Teddy nods and reaches for the soup. 

“Careful, that’s hot.”

He rolls his eyes. “I know it’s hot, Dad, I can see the steam.” He takes a spoonful anyway. “Thanks.”

Papa would tell him not to talk with his mouth full, but Dad just smiles that same tired smile, sits down on the bed, and brushes Teddy’s hair back, hand lingering on his forehead to check that he isn’t feverish. Teddy huffs a little, but allows him his coddling. 

“Gets a little boring, being cooped up in here, huh?” says Dad. 

Teddy nods, trying not to look sullen. 

“You know, back on Earth, there’s a story we tell to sick children.”

“A story?” Teddy curls up with his back against the pillows and pulls his knees up to his chest. It’s been a while since Dad or Papa told him a story; since he learned to read he mostly prefers to entertain himself. It’s more adult. But he’s always loved a good story, and since he can’t read any himself he supposes he can let Dad tell him one. Just this once. “What kind of story?” he asks. 

Dad hums, thinking. “Oh, it’s got a little of everything, really. There’s fighting and friendship, and chases and escapes, and revenge and true love and magic. Does that sound okay?”

Teddy closes his eyes, readying himself to listen. “Yeah, I think it sounds good.”

“Okay.” Dad pauses. “I should probably warn you, there’s some kissing in this story.”

Teddy’s eyes snap open and he scowls indignantly. “I’m ten years old, Dad. I understand about kissing.”

Dad raises his hands in placation. “Alright, alright. Just thought I’d mention it, in case you wanted me to skip it.”

“I don’t mind. As long as there’s lots of adventure.”

“Well there’s definitely that,” Dad assures. “So, then: Buttercup was raised on a farm in a faraway land called Indiana.”

~

Eliot hated the farm. He hated the muck and the fields and the early mornings. He hated the smells and the sounds. Most of all, he hated how lonely he felt. His family didn’t bear speaking of, and neither did anyone else in Indiana. It was pretty much a universally terrible place. 

The only person Eliot had any fondness for was Quentin, the boy who worked in the stables, and Eliot delighted in teasing and tormenting him. Quentin never seemed to mind it, though, just let himself be bossed around with an easy smile and an “As you wish.” Eliot suspected Quentin knew perfectly well what kind of game he was playing, and was as glad of the company as he was. 

“Farm Boy,” he would say, “polish my horse’s saddle.” Or “Farm Boy, fill these up with water.” Farm boy, farm boy, farm boy. As you wish, as you wish, as you wish. And though the tone of his response varied from indulgent to exasperated, though Quentin sometimes rolled his eyes or called Eliot spoiled, he was always true to his word. And he always flashed that dimpled grin when Eliot was pleased with his work. 

~

“Wait, why does he keep calling Westley ‘Farm Boy’? Aren’t they both farm boys?”

“Well, yes. But Buttercup has a little bit of an attitude problem sometimes.”

“Ohh,” says Teddy, nodding sagely. “I get it.” He doesn’t. 

Dad smiles. 

~

They spent more time together than not, talking and laughing and sometimes driving each other crazy. It’s inevitable when two people are so attached. And attached they had certainly become. 

One day, Eliot said, “Are you ever going to kiss me?”

And Quentin said, “Are you ever going to ask?”

Eliot was silent for a moment, studying him in the orange glow of sunset. He saw nothing but truth and tenderness in his gaze. So he said: “Farm Boy. Kiss me.”

And Quentin did, leaning in close with a whispered “As you wish,” and confirming to them both that this was exactly as it was meant to be. 

“Quentin,” Eliot said for the very first time aloud, “ _Quentin_ ,” breathing the name as though it were a promise. And in fact it was. 

~

Dad is quiet for a moment, smoothing his hand over the quilt Teddy is nestled under, his eyes crinkled at the corners. 

“You said there was adventure,” says Teddy. 

Dad looks up. “I sure did.”

“Farming and kissing isn’t an adventure.”

Dad laughs then, the way grown ups sometimes do right before they tell you you’ll understand something when you’re older. “Well, sometimes it is,” he says. “But don’t worry. This is just the exposition.”

“That means the beginning, right? Before the journey starts?” Every story has a journey, Teddy knows, only sometimes it’s literal and sometimes it isn’t. He knows a lot about stories. 

“Exactly. See, you have to get to know who the characters are before they go on the journey. That way at the end you can see how it’s changed them.”

“What about how it _hasn’t_ changed them?” This is the kind of question that gets Teddy called a ‘smart-aleck’ in school. It’s his favorite kind of question to ask. 

Dad considers it seriously. “That too,” he agrees. “This one will change them a lot, though.”

~

To fulfill such a promise requires many things, and though Quentin and Eliot had several of them there were some which they were lacking. Love they had in spades, and trust, and time, and the will to see it through. But they had no home of their own and no money to make one. So it was that Quentin packed his few belongings and took a job on a merchant ship. 

On the day of his departure the pair of them lingered at the gate, savoring the moments they had together before they were parted. 

“You don’t have to go,” Eliot said very quietly.

“You know I do,” Quentin responded gently. “We can’t stay here forever.”

Eliot wrinkled his nose with distaste. “No, of course not. But we could, I don’t know, leave together and seek our fortune across the sea or something.” 

“And what would we do if the fortune we sought didn’t appear?” Quentin shook his head. “This is reliable work, and I’ll make enough for us to leave together for good. No slouching back home empty handed.”

“Home,” scoffed Eliot. “What kind of home is this if I’m here without you?”

“The kind I’ll dream of every night I’m away from you.”

“Ugh. Fine. Be charming, then.” Eliot rolled his eyes and stared glumly out at the fields. He couldn’t look Quentin in the eyes as he admitted to the dark thought that had been growing inside him. “I fear I’ll never see you again.”

“Of course you will,” said Quentin. He sounded shocked at the suggestion. 

“But what if something happens?”

“Listen to me. No matter what happens, I will come back to you. I will always come back to you.”

“You say that as though you could possibly be sure.” Eliot braved a look back at him, raising a skeptical brow. 

Quentin’s smile was warm as the night they’d first kissed. “Of course I’m sure,” he said. “You think love like this happens every day?”

Eliot felt his breath catch in his chest. “It will for us,” he vowed. “Every single day, I will love you beyond measure. As long as you always come back to me.”

“I swear it,” said Quentin, reaching up to cup his jaw. 

Eliot circled Quentin’s wrist with his hand, held him there. “Then so do I.” 

And they parted with a kiss. 

It wasn’t until months later that Eliot learned it had been their last. Quentin’s ship was attacked by the Dread Pirate Roberts, who never left captives alive. When Eliot received the news of his intended’s murder-

~

“What the _hell_ , Dad?”

“Language,” Dad scolds, failing to sound stern. 

“What the hell! You said Westley and Buttercup were going to _change_ on their journey, not that they were going to _die_ before it started!”

“Death is a kind of change,” Dad says mildly. 

“ _Dad_.”

“Okay, okay, just. Give it a minute, alright? I promise everything turns out okay.”

Teddy stares him down suspiciously. 

“Well, sometimes things get worse before they get better.”

“But they _do_ get better?”

“Promise.”

“Fine.” Teddy settles back into the pillows and waves his hand commandingly. “You can keep going, then.”

Dad rolls his eyes. “Yes, your majesty.”

~

When Eliot received the news of his intended’s murder, he shut himself in his room for days, unable to eat or sleep. He felt he could never love again. 

Unable to bear his life on the farm, all alone and seeing memories of his lost love in every corner, he set out to find someplace he could start anew. It was a few years before he settled in Fillory, making a life for himself as a knife maker’s apprentice, and another before royalty came knocking on his door. 

~

Teddy knows a lot about stories, and he knows what happens when royalty enters the equation. “And now the journey begins?” he asks. 

“And now the journey begins.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so like. listen. i would say i have no idea how this happened, but the truth is that it was pretty much inevitable. 
> 
> that said, i have absolutely no idea how long this will be or when i will manage to finish it. or even, like, continue it. life is uuuhhhh hectic, my friends. we’ll see how this goes. 
> 
> i can’t believe i wrote a whole chapter where q is basically just fantasizing about him and his husband saying sappy things to each other. like jeez, dude, chill out. he just went to the store he’ll be back in like a couple hours. you don’t have to pine.
> 
> also sorry for being so down on indiana! i've never even been there and have nothing against it, but q has some Thoughts on the place, via el.
> 
> title is a quote from the wedding scene cause it felt appropriately cheesy.


	2. The Ship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna wait to post this until i had more written so that i would have a better idea of how long each chapter should be, but, well. i got impatient with myself. i’m already throwing consistency out the window schedule-wise, why not wordcount-wise as well? from now on a chapter ends when i say it does!

Eliot hated Whitespire. He hoped this sort of thing wasn’t going to become a trend.

Castle Whitespire was several steps up from his origins aesthetically speaking — perhaps an entire spiral staircase up, if you wanted to get cute about it — but the company was of about the same caliber. His only ally in the place was Princess Fen, his bride-to-be, who was approximately as enthused about their shared circumstances as he was. 

Fen was the daughter of the man Eliot had been apprenticed to. She had been taken from her home years ago and made heir to the throne by King Ember, who took somewhat of a whimsical approach to matters of succession and the law in general. Then one day the king had brought her to visit her father under his royal supervision and, after one look at Eliot, declared that he would make the perfect prince for her. Never mind that he was a commoner, a foreigner, largely uninterested in women, and right in the middle of balancing the books. King Ember had liked him and that had been that. He was spirited away to the castle just as Fen had been years before.

She sat beside him now, hand in his, skirt laid out like a blanket on the ground for him to rest his head upon. The pair of them had slipped out into the gardens for a moment of peace. Eliot’s months at Whitespire had seen him learn plenty about sneaking around and avoiding all manner of royal events and responsibilities, but he had nothing on Fen’s expertise. She’d had years to learn the intricacies of castle life and thus knew precisely which cluster of flowering bushes provided the best cover from any unwelcome eyes. 

Anyone who noticed them here would probably assume they were courting, anyway. Now _there_ was a joke. 

“Your turn,” said Fen. “Ask me a question.”

“Hmm.” Eliot considered. “What’s the first thing you’ll do as queen?”

“I think I’ll invite my father to come live in the castle. If he likes.”

“Wise of you,” said Eliot. “Too many visits and Ember will end up kidnapping everyone in the village.”

Fen snorted. “Well, outlawing kidnapping will be the second thing I do.”

“It’s good to have your priorities in order.” He patted her knee affectionately. “Your turn.”

“What is it like to be in love?”

Oh. He hadn’t been expecting that. They played this game of questions often, Eliot and Fen, reasoning that as long as they were to be married they ought to at least know each other as friends. During one such game he had told her a little about Quentin, about his kind nature and his callused hands and the way he would permit Eliot anything. And then about the merchant ship, and the Dread Pirate Roberts, and the years Eliot had spent wandering, directionless, afterward. He had skimmed over the surface of it all, giving Fen what knowledge of him he felt he owed her as her betrothed, never touching upon the parts of it that were still too tender even now. That would be too tender forever, perhaps. 

He must have been silent for a few moments too long, because Fen noticed his hesitance and tried to withdraw the question. “I’m sorry,” she told him, sympathy in her voice, “I know it’s difficult for you to talk about. I just wondered.”

“No, it’s… well, it’s not alright,” he admitted, “but I understand.”

“I didn’t mean to be unkind.”

“I know.” He lay there for a moment more, cheek pressed into the marigold velvet of Fen’s skirt. Fen, who didn’t care about dirtying her dress as long as they were both comfortable. Fen, who had told him of her days as a resistance fighter, knowing that she could be tried for crimes against the crown if he betrayed her confidence. Fen, who trusted him. Fen, his only friend. 

“It’s… hard to explain,” he said finally, throat feeling tight, “to someone who hasn’t felt it.” Fen looked down at him, blinking in surprise. He turned his face away from her and continued, staring very hard at a rosebush. “It’s like… things that didn’t matter to you before, they begin to matter. Like the future. Or yourself. And things that did matter, like loneliness and pain and anger… they still matter, but not as much. They don’t scare you as much. Because he’s- because they’re there with you, through it, and you don’t have to-” Eliot paused, controlling himself. Soft white petals fluttered to the ground. “You don’t have to feel it alone.”

Fen’s fingers were tight around his. “Thank you,” she said, when it was clear he would say no more.

He nodded and watched the petals fall. 

That evening, he rode his horse faster and farther into the forest than he had ever dared to before. Bandits be damned. He would stretch his one small freedom to its limits, whatever the consequences. 

Those consequences became apparent, though not immediately, when he found his path blocked by three strange women. 

“My lord,” the blonde one called out, “a word with you, please?” 

Eliot eyed them suspiciously. He was a practiced enough magician to know the air around them sang with magic, and a practiced enough liar to recognize the shrewd, dishonest looks in their eyes that marked them as something besides innocent travelers. 

Still, it was always best to tread with caution. “How can I help you?” 

“We’re unfamiliar with this area and have become lost,” said the blonde. She seemed to be at the forefront of whatever this little operation was. “Is there a village nearby we could rest in?”

“Certainly,” Eliot lied. “Just past this glen is the town I’m riding from. They have an inn that should accommodate you.”

The blonde smiled a sharp-edged smile. “Excellent. We really should get some sleep.” As she said the words, the tawny-skinned brunette beside her made a few deft motions with her hands, eyes on Eliot-

And Eliot slept. 

~

Prince Eliot woke up a few hours into the boat ride. Which was nice, because having to hover him everywhere was pretty impractical. They'd kept accidentally bumping his head on things.

What wasn't nice was the attitude he took about the whole thing. He alternated between sulking and demanding imperiously that they tell him what they wanted with him. 

Eventually, Margo snapped. “Holy shit, we’re not just gonna tell you all about our evil plan! Quit asking.”

He gazed back impassively. “Ah, so there’s an evil plan.”

“Oh my god,” grumbled Alice. “Why couldn’t it have been the other one?”

“The other one… Do you mean Princess Fen?” The prince’s brow furrowed. “You didn’t even know which of us you were going to kidnap? What, did you flip a coin or something?”

“You were the first one we ran into,” Julia said from her post at the stern. She’d been watching the water behind them to ensure they weren’t being followed. 

The prince looked alarmed. It was the first time he’d seemed at all worried about the situation. “My god,” he said, “you haven’t thought this through at all. Do you even _know_ what you intend to do with me? Is that why you won’t tell me?”

“We won’t tell you because you’re our captive!” Alice snarled. She hated to have her plans questioned. 

Margo rolled her eyes, fed up with both of them. “Fucking hell, what is this, a performance review? You been kidnapped before? You some kind of expert?”

The prince glared at her, every inch of body language speaking of reproach. “Of course I’ve been kidnapped before,” he replied haughtily. “How do you think I got to Whitespire in the first place?”

Margo looked at Alice, then at Julia. They seemed as surprised as she was.

“On horseback?” Julia suggested, as if now was the time for corny jokes. 

“Sure," he agreed, "on horseback. Under the authority of King Ember and several armed guards with no concern as to whether or not I felt like being a heterosexually married prince. I was perfectly happy as a common knife-maker-in-training before they showed up and dragged me away and stuck a crown on my head. Fen, too.”

Well, shit, Margo thought. “Well, shit,” she said, too. She’d never been one to hold back for politeness’ sake. “They just abducted you? That’s totally fucked up.”

The prince looked dully incredulous. “You yourself are abducting me right this very second,” he pointed out. 

“Well, yeah, sure. But at least we’re being up front about it. No PR department to spin it like a royal love story.” She paused for a second, considering. “I mean, unless you _want_ us to play it like you ran off to be with King Idri. We could probably swing that, honestly; we’re good at what we do.” She looked to Alice for confirmation. 

Alice nodded. “I don’t see why not,” she said. “It would serve our purposes just as well. We don’t really have to kill you.”

The prince stared between them for a moment, looking a lot less frightened than he probably should’ve. Almost bored, really. “Wonderful.” He heaved a deep sigh and slumped back against the side of the ship. “Well, at least I get to be presumed lovers with a man in this scenario. That’s a step toward authenticity." 

God, what a drama queen. Margo was starting to find him entertaining. 

“There’s someone behind us,” Julia called. “At least, I think there is. Another ship.”

Alice shook her head. “It’s probably a coincidence,” she said. “No one in Fillory could have caught up with us so quickly.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” said the prince. “King Ember does a lot of things he shouldn’t be able to. And he’s very possessive. I’m sure he’ll catch you and have you all hanged.”

Alice’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Is that a threat?”

He shrugged. “Just a statement of fact. Why would I threaten you? You’re all a lot more likable than my last kidnapper.”

Alice tilted her head. “Your last kidnapper being King Ember.”

“Yup.”

“Who you say is going to execute us.”

“The very same.”

“I actually have some theories on him.”

“But you’re not going to tell me any of them, because I’m your captive?”

“You’re quick.”

Prince Eliot looked over at Margo, eyebrows raised as if to say, _Is she always like this_? She coughed to cover a snicker. _Yup_. 

“Look, we’re not gonna hurt you, if it makes you feel better,” she offered. 

“You literally kidnapped me,” he said flatly. He pointed at Alice. “She was talking about killing me a minute ago.”

“Yes, and we decided that we don’t have to. Faking a death is really not that hard.” Alice sniffed primly. 

“And anyway,” said Margo, “is it _really_ a kidnapping if you didn’t actually want to be in the place we kidnapped you from?”

“Yes,” everyone else answered in unison. 

“Aw, shut up. Just think of this as a daring rescue.”

“No,” said Alice, “It’s definitely a kidnapping. That’s what we’re getting paid for.”

Margo pouted. “Fine. You’re all so fucking boring.”

“Hey guys?” Julia’s voice rang out high and uncertain. “We’re like, _definitely_ being followed.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Alice protested. She made her way over to the stern to argue with Julia in barely-hushed tones. Which left Margo alone with the prince. 

“So,” he said. 

“So,” she agreed. 

Silence. 

“I’m Eliot.”

“I know who you are, dickhead.”

“No, see, that’s called initiating conversation. Now it’s _your_ turn to tell me _your_ name.”

Margo crossed her arms and looked him over appraisingly. The cocked head, the arched brow, the incongruously casual posture. “You’re kind of a bitch, aren’t you?” 

Eliot spread his arms, all _well-what-can-you-do_ tragic. “Personality defect, I’m afraid.”

Margo smirked. She could get behind that. “Well, I approve,” she said. “I’m Margo.”

“Lovely to meet you, Margo.” He offered her a wry smile. “I do believe this is the beginning of a beautiful captor-slash-captive relationship.”

She laughed aloud. “God, you are so fucking weird.”

~

“Fezzik is a funny name for a girl,” says Teddy. 

“It sure is.”

“She says ‘flip’ and ‘shoot’ and stuff like that a whole lot.”

“She sure does.”

~

The Cliffs of Insanity loomed before them by dawn, a towering wall of sheer black rock. It was terrible to behold, and a hell of a lot worse to climb. But Alice knew what she was doing. They had come prepared.

The ship behind them had kept pace all through the night, never falling behind, but never quite overtaking them either. Alice eyed it nervously as they secured their own ship and swiftly made ready to ascend the cliffs. Once they were at the top, their pursuer would be lost.

Julia and Margo took either end of the modified gravity belt the three of them had made and began securing it around all of them at once.

"What the fuck is this," said the prince.

"We're going to levitate up to the top of the cliff," Alice explained. "It's impossible to climb otherwise."

"No no, I know what it is. I just mean that it's the ugliest thing I've ever worn at the same time as three strangers."

Margo cackled her chronically irreverent ass off, naturally. She and the prince seemed to be forming a weird sort of bond. Julia snorted a little as well. Alice, for her part, just felt very tired. She had felt very tired throughout this entire endeavor.

"Can we please just get started? This is going to take a while, and I'd like to reach the top before that ship catches up with us."

"As you wish," he mumbled, and then coughed, looking suddenly sullen.

"Let's get our hover on," agreed Julia, and spun the dial.

"Holy fucking balls!" cried Margo as their feet were wrenched from the ground. "Can't you start gentle? It's been a while."

Their ascent was long and largely uneventful — Margo and Prince Eliot chattered away the whole time as though they were having a pleasant picnic rather than slowly bobbing upward along a cliff face — until the pursuing ship drew in close to the shore and a man dressed all in black emerged. He stood at the bottom of the cliff and looked up, hand cupped against his forehead to block the sun. It was difficult to make out details at this distance, but Alice could see he carried a sword and wore a black mask over his eyes. "Hey, Julia?" Alice nudged her companion. "Turn this thing up a few notches. I don't like the look of this guy."

"It can only carry so much so fast," said Julia, but she turned it up regardless.

Below them, the Man in Black enchanted a rope, which slithered steadily up the cliff until it apparently found an anchor at the top. So, he was a magician too. Fantastic. He took hold of the rope and began to climb. 

"What the fuck," breathed Alice. "What the _fuck_. Who climbs the Cliffs of Insanity?"

"Someone insane?" suggested Julia.

"Stands to reason," said Prince Eliot.

"It's right there in the name," Margo agreed.

Alice was not being paid enough for this kind of sass. "Just turn it up again," she said. "Let's lose him."

~

Morning arrived the way it always did in Castle Whitespire: sunlight streamed fierce and golden through the east-facing windows, gleaming off the pale stone of its walls, making the whole place look like a precious moonstone, a mirage, a marvel. It was breathtaking from a distance. It was incredibly annoying, though, if you were inside it. The entire east wing was unbearable in the early morning, the light glinting viciously in Fen's eyes as she made her way down the corridor.

Eliot hadn't returned last night.

Fen knew he had been upset after they talked in the garden, and she knew he sometimes strayed too far from the forest path in fits of reckless emotion, but he had never stayed out all night before. And he had never done anything _too_ foolish without at least mentioning it to her first. She had a terrible feeling in her gut. Something had happened to Eliot. She was certain.

King Ember was lounging on his throne when she burst into the room, draped sideways over the arm with his feet propped up on the empty throne beside his. A servant was feeding him grapes one by one, and frankly looking less than pleased about it. Count Reynard, Ember's closest advisor, stood behind the throne, leaning on it as he spoke gravely with the king about something Fen did not care to listen to.

She cut him off without hesitation. What she had to say was more important. "Prince Eliot is missing."

King Ember looked up at her in surprise. "Oh, hello, Princess Fen. What are you doing here?"

Fen blinked. Was he really so callously unconcerned? “I'm here to tell you that Prince Eliot is missing,” she repeated. “I just said."

"Well, of course he is. We were just about to muster a search party." King Ember waved away the servant, who looked terribly relieved.

Fen looked them over, scowling. Try as she might, she had never quite learned to mask her emotions. She suspected it was why the king had tired of her being his sole royal plaything; she could never hide her distaste for him. "You don't look like you're being especially urgent about it," she said.

Count Reynard smiled his thin, vulpine smile. The damn thing always made Fen's skin crawl. "You should speak to your king with a little more respect, Princess."

Fen swallowed hard, containing her bile. "Please, Your Majesty," she said evenly, "allow me to join the search party. I'm sure you know how much Prince Eliot means to me. I want to do all I can to protect him."

King Ember sighed long and dramatic, his mouth still full of grape mush. "How positively sweet," he said, looking pleased nearly to ecstasy. "The young lovers wish to be reunited. Of course you can join the search party! I would have nothing else."

"Ah, Your Majesty," began Count Reynard, "Is that really the best course of-"

"Yes! My mind is made up. Princess Fen, you will join the search party headed by Count Reynard. When do you intend to leave?"

"Perhaps-"

"As soon as possible," interrupted Fen. "We cannot allow Fillory's enemies to harm Prince Eliot. I will speak to you again to inform you of our departure."

And with that, she left to gather a party of knights. Count Reynard might be heading the search, but she didn't trust him to lift a finger for Eliot. She didn't trust a single person in this castle. She would find her friend and rescue him the way she had done everything from the day Ember stole her until the day he stole Eliot: by her damn self.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let fen have plot relevance 2k19!! she deserves to swashbuckle!!!
> 
> anyway i think i made the casting pretty clear and i certainly hope that the way i wrote this speaks for itself, but just in case, for clarity’s sake, because i hate it when i just can’t tell:
> 
> **_DRAMATIS PERSONAE_**  
>  _(thus far)_
> 
>  **eliot** — buttercup  
>  **quentin** — westley  
>  **alice** — vizzini  
>  **julia** — inigo montoya  
>  **margo** — fezzik  
>  **reynard** — count rugen  
>  **ember** — humperdinck, only he’s a king instead of a prince for Reasons  
>  **fen** — fen’s just fen! she partially inhabits humperdinck’s role, because duh, but there is just no possible universe where i make her a villain. so instead she’s a counterpart and friend to eliot, equally a pawn of ember, a victim of her circumstances but working as always to overcome them


	3. The Cliffs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> domesticity? did anyone order some domesticity?? venti extra whip?

The door creaks its familiar creak as it swings open. "How are my boys?" asks Papa as he enters with a basket full of supplies from town. He removes the spell that kept him and the basket dry and starts putting things away. "Did you miss me while I was gone?"

Teddy and Dad exchange a look. "Nope," they say in unison.

Papa grins. "Liars, both of you." He sits on the edge of the bed with a spoon and a little green glass bottle. Teddy eyes the bottle with displeasure, grimacing as Papa uncorks it and pours out a spoonful. "Oh, come on," says Papa, seeing his face. "It's not so bad. And it'll make you feel better."

"I'd rather swallow a worm," says Teddy.

Dad snorts. "You did swallow a worm," he says, "when you were little."

"What! No, I didn't!"

"You most certainly did," says Papa. "You found it in the garden and we just couldn't stop you in time. Your mother had to pry the second one out of your hands before you could eat that, too."

Teddy covers his face with his hands. "That's so gross," he says. "That's so, so gross."

"Exactly," agrees Papa. "So you won't mind drinking a spoonful of Miss Asterid's tincture."

"I will definitely mind it."

"More than the worm?" asks Dad.

Teddy glares at the both of them, feeling ganged up on. "Fine," he says. "But I'm going to hate it."

"I can live with that." Papa holds out the spoon. "Open wide."

Teddy pinches his nose dramatically as he takes the medicine. It tastes like it's angry at the inside of his mouth. "Bleaugh," he grumbles once it's down, sticking his tongue out. "That's the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted." He crosses his arms. "You're lucky I survived it."

Dad tries to hide a chuckle at his performance. Papa sets the bottle and the spoon on the nightstand next to the empty soup bowl and kisses his forehead. "Thank you for your bravery," he says very solemnly. "Now, this should get the taste out of your mouth." He pulls a little oblong wax-paper-wrapped shape from his pocket.

Teddy unwraps it eagerly to find one of Miss Asterid's honey lozenges. He shoves it in his mouth to chase away the bitterness. "Mm," he says. "I forgive you now."

Dad lays his head on Papa’s shoulder. “He gets the theatrics from you, you know.”

“I know, darling.”

"What happens next in the story?" asks Teddy, his words coming out funny around the lozenge. "Do they make it up the cliff?"

"Ooh, a story?" asks Papa. He nestles into the pillows, curling a cozy arm around Teddy. "By all means, continue. _Do_ they make it up the cliff?"

Dad looks between the two of them, smiling the way he only ever does for them. "Yeah," he says. "They make it up the cliff."

~

They made it up the Cliffs of Insanity in record time, pushing the gravity belt to its limits, and when they finally stood at the top it should have been a relief. But the Man in Black just kept climbing. Alice watched his progress with some trepidation. “You think he’ll make it up?” asked Julia.

Alice twisted her mouth to the side. “I don’t see how he could,” she said. “But I also don’t think we should risk it. Julia, would you-”

But Julia had already brought her sword down on the enchanted rope, severing it and the man’s pursuit in one stroke. At least, it seemed she had. Peering over the edge revealed that the man was still climbing the rocks freehand, and looking pretty chagrined about the whole thing. “RUDE!” he called up to them. 

Margo raised her eyebrows. “Your stalker is real determined, El.”

Prince Eliot shrugged. “I’m in very high demand.”

~

Papa hums thoughtfully and Teddy cranes his neck to look up at him. His expression is skeptical. “Prince Buttercup, huh?”

“Hey, it’s a respectable role,” says Dad. “Robin Wright. Main character and everything.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t even get a sword. He’s a damsel in distress.”

Dad looks scandalized. “Buttercup doesn’t need a sword! Buttercup is a dynamic character in his own right and he doesn’t need to prove it through violence.”

Teddy looks back and forth between his fathers. He doesn’t understand their conversations, sometimes. He wonders if it’s adult stuff or Earth stuff this time. 

“Right,” says Papa, drawing the word out extra long. _Riiiiight_. “And does Westley get a sword?”

Dad scowls. “Yes, Westley gets a sword.”

“Uh-huh. See, I think you might be remembering some stuff wrong, is the thing. But don’t worry; I can help you with that.”

“Can you?” asks Dad. “Do you even know the Princess Bride?”

Who the hell is the princess bride?

“Young Cary Elwes? Please. You know how I go for floppy hair and puppy dog eyes.”

 _Who_ carries elves? “Guys?” Teddy cuts in. “Are you gonna tell the story?”

“We most certainly are,” says Papa. “Go on, Q, I’ll be right here to remind you if you forget anything important.”

“Oh, thank you _so_ much.”

~

Julia, against all reasonable expectations of a woman tasked with kidnapping a prince and smuggling him away through the Fillorian wilderness, was bored. 

Alice and Eliot had continued forward on their own, leaving Julia behind at the cliff to stop the Man in Black, and Margo lurking some ways ahead as a backup plan. Julia had never actually needed a backup plan in all her years as a master of sword magic, but it was thoughtful anyway, she supposed. Prudent to ensure there would be someone around to patch her up if need be. Margo had been saying something violent about boulders as she stalked off to look for a good vantage point, though, so maybe it was more that she just wanted a chance to get a good shot in. 

Wind gusted off the ocean, spiraled up the cliff face, and stirred the air around her, catching locks of her hair in its eddies. It smelled of brine and ancient stone and the vast, open surface of the sea. Gravel crunched under her boots with every step. Her sword, the indomitable Leo Blade, gleamed silver and striking in the morning sun. 

God, what was _taking_ this guy so long? If she couldn’t hear the occasional sound of pebbles skittering down the cliff, knocked loose by his boots, she would think he’d fallen. 

She leaned cautiously over the edge. Sure enough, there he was, slowly but surely making his way upward. “Hello there,” she called. He nodded in answer. “Slow going?”

The man squinted up at her. “Look, no offense,” he said, “but I’m kind of trying to concentrate here. This is harder than it looks.”

“Right. Uh, sorry.” Julia stepped back from the edge. She swung her sword this way and that for a minute, loosening her muscles, admiring the shine of it in the sunlight. More pebbles skittered down the cliff.

She resheathed her sword and looked over the edge again. “It’s just that this is taking kind of a long time,” she explained. “I’ve got places to be. My associates are waiting for me.”

The Man in Black paused on a rapier-thin ledge. “If you’re in such a hurry, why don’t you offer some actual help?” He was glaring at her, she was pretty sure. It was hard to tell with the mask and all. 

“Oh.” Julia considered this. “I mean, I guess I could. I figured you wouldn’t want my help, since I’m only waiting around to kill you.”

“That does put a damper on our relationship,” he agreed. 

“Well, I promise not to kill you until you reach the top.”

“How comforting.” He sure had an attitude for a guy totally at her mercy.

“Look, will you let me help or not?” She hated waiting. It made her feel useless. “I can levitate you. It only works for short distances, but I’m pretty sure you’re close enough to the top.”

“ _Pretty_ sure?”

“I won’t drop you! I give you my word.”

“What good is your word to me? I don’t even know you.”

Julia nodded. Fair enough. For a moment, she simply watched his progress. “You’re going to slip and fall and end up dead,” she told him conversationally. 

“Says the woman waiting around to kill me.”

She pursed her lips. “Listen,” she said. “I make no guarantees about what will happen after you get up here. But I swear to you that you will reach the top unharmed. I swear it on the souls of my fallen friends.”

The Man in Black looked up at her again, long and steady. Perhaps he was searching her for honesty. And it seemed that he found it. “Alright. Cast your spell.”

Julia grinned. She was nearly as good at persuasion as she was with a sword. Her hands moved swiftly through familiar motions, lifting him through the air and depositing him before her with ease. 

“Thanks,” he said, when his feet touched the ground again. He was winded and clutching a stitch in his side, but he drew his sword nonetheless. 

“Oh, no, please, sit down,” she said. “Rest for a moment. I like a fair fight.”

He looked wary but did as she said, lowering himself onto a large rock. She offered him a smile, bright and guileless as she could muster. He only looked more suspicious.

Well. As long as he was already uncomfortable. “Pardon me,” she asked, “but what color are your eyes? It’s hard to tell through the mask.”

He looked up from dumping the gravel out of his boots. “Is this just how you start conversations with people?”

“Humor me, please.”

“Okay, uh. Brown.”

Julia nodded. She hadn’t expected anything, really, but it was worth checking. 

“May I ask why you’re interested?”

“I suppose you may,” she said. She sat beside him, sighing deeply. Even after all these years, the story sat like a rock in her gut, the sharp edges of it digging into her lungs with each breath. “I swore to you,” she said, “that I would help you reach the top.”

“So you did.”

“I swore to you on the souls of the friends who taught me the very spell I used.” She closed her eyes. “Richard. Silver. Menolly. Bender.” Her breath caught at the next name: “Kady.”

A hand brushed against hers where it lay on the stone, just lightly. Hesitantly. “I’m sorry,” said the Man in Black. 

“I never studied magic formally,” she continued. “I began as a hedge witch. They were my coven. My family. For years, they were all I had. And then came the Yellow-Eyed Man. He destroyed us. He murdered my friends, one by one. I won’t speak of what he did to me. Only Kady escaped. I begged her to run as he fell upon me, and thank the Goddess she did. I don’t know where she is now. I haven’t seen her since that night.” She opened her eyes. She could see his, now, this close in the sunlight. Deep brown and, against all odds, sympathetic. 

She looked away, turning her face into the breeze. “I don’t know why he chose us. He hated the goddess we were worshiping, but we were far from her only devotees. I hear stories, though, from time to time, of other covens slaughtered the way mine was. He’s still out there, killing innocent people. Hurting other women. I’ve spent years learning the magic of the blade, finding a weapon powerful enough to pierce his wards. Tracking him across Fillory. But it was so long ago, and I was so frightened, I can hardly recall his face. All I remember-” she cut herself off with a shiver. “All I remember are his sickly yellow eyes, staring into mine. One day, I will look into those eyes as I cut his heart out.”

The Man in Black let out a long breath, as though he had been holding it. “Jesus,” he said. “I hope you do.”

“I am rarely denied what I want,” she assured him. Then she stood and drew her blade. They had delayed long enough. “Are you ready?”

He cleared his throat, seeming to remember himself. “As I’ll ever be.”

“You know,” she said as he drew his sword, “I feel a little weird killing you after all that.” 

He shrugged. “Well, I feel a little weird dying. Call it even?” 

“Sounds good.” And without another word, she lunged at him. 

Sword magic is a peculiar thing. Like all fields of magic it relies upon the caster’s affinity for its particulars, and upon their understanding of its principles. It also, however, draws from the well of the magician’s own underlying principles: their motives, their morals, the means by which they found and pursued the blade. The power of it flows from deep inside the caster, up and out and through the blade they wield. 

Julia had studied sword magic for many years now, and she and the Leo Blade were a deadly pair. Her need for vengeance was powerful, tempered to an unbreakable thing within her by the fire of her pain and her perseverance. In a fight with a cruel and unjust man, someone who took pleasure in destroying beautiful things, she would be as close to unstoppable as any mortal could ever hope for. Never would there be a blade so bloodthirsty as the one through which she channeled her fury. 

In this fight, she began as brutally as she ever had, fueled by the desire to protect her friends. The Leo Blade sliced through the air, biting into the Man in Black’s flesh no small number of times. He knocked it away each time, fighting her off and regaining what footing he had lost, finding what openings he could to strike back at her. Finally, he pierced through her defenses to land a blow. Julia felt the sting of sharp metal at her shoulder, felt hot blood bloom at its touch, felt- 

Felt him falter. Saw him hesitate, just for half a heartbeat. It was long enough to knock his blade aside and drive him back to the edge of the cliff. And it was long enough to make her wonder. 

The fight continued, but it had changed. Her fire had waned, and the Man in Black seemed to notice. His blade caught at her again and again and each time she watched his face. His jaw was clenched, his brow furrowed fiercely, sweat beaded on his forehead. But something was strange: all his steel was in his blade, and none of it in his eyes. Julia had battled many people in her time. She had fought for justice, and for money, and for her life. She knew enough to know when someone wanted to kill her. The Man in Black did not. 

She swung her blade so it connected with his and pivoted her feet, moving toward his shoulder in a clockwise spin, bringing their blades down and wrenching sideways until his grip was broken. His sword clattered to the ground. She placed her foot on it and arched a brow at him. He fumbled for a moment, backed into a proverbial corner, and then his hands came up to form the familiar shapes of a basic battle magic spell. 

Julia held the Leo Blade to her own throat. The Man in Black froze. 

Ah. Now she had his attention. “You want to kill me?” she asked. “Do it. I offer you my sword.” She held the hilt out toward him, the tip still angled toward her chin. 

He opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again. “What the fuck?” he said. 

~ 

Teddy is absolutely rapt. “Inigo is so cool,” he says. “She’s _so_ cool.” 

Dad grins. “She really is,” he agrees. “The Man in Black is pretty lucky, huh? She definitely could’ve killed him if she wanted.” 

“Hmm,” says Papa from somewhere in the vicinity of Teddy’s hair. “I thought they were better matched than that.” 

“Oh, definitely not,” says Dad. 

“Yeah, were you even listening?” asks Teddy. “She’s way better.” 

“It’s a creative approach to the story, certainly,” says Papa, even though that’s not what they were talking about at all. “Some interesting reinterpretations. I’m eager to see where it’s going.” 

“Then you should probably let me keep telling it,” says Dad. “ _Anyway_ -” 

~

“Let's call a time out,” said Julia.

The Man in Black squinted at her from behind his mask. “That’s, uh, that’s. Not really how swordfights work, I think,” he said. 

Julia sheathed the Leo Blade. “None of this is how swordfights work,” she said. “See, in a regular swordfight, you would actually want to kill me.”

“I _do_ want to kill you,” he growled, eyeing the sword beneath her foot. 

“Then why didn’t you take me up on the offer?” she asked. 

He was silent, lips pressed together tightly.

“I don’t really want to kill you either,” she said, “if that helps. I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m no one of consequence.”

“I’d like to know, all the same.”

The Man in Black shrugged almost apologetically. “Get used to disappointment.”

Julia rolled her eyes, unimpressed. “Fine. At least tell me why you’re pursuing us. You say you want to kill me? Well, neither of us should kill each other without understanding what we’re doing it for.”

His mouth twisted with something like rage. It was the deadliest he had looked as yet. “You’ve kidnapped an innocent man,” he said, voice tight. “And god only knows what you’re going to do with him. Ransom or torture or murder him. I won’t stand for that.”

Huh. She wasn’t really expecting the humanitarian angle from this guy, with the mask and the black and the sword and the stupid little villain mustache. Apparently looks could be deceiving. “Oh,” she said. “Well. If it makes you feel better, he’s really just a political pawn. We’re trying to incite a war between Loria and Fillory. You know, like, Helen of Troy style. We’re not actually gonna hurt him.”

“You kidnapped him for the express purpose of _starting a war_ and you expect me to believe that he’s totally safe with you?”

“I don’t expect you to believe anything, but I’m telling you the truth.” She sighed, sensing a need to change tacks. “Look, do you want to talk to my associates? Or to Prince Eliot? He wasn’t exactly thrilled to be at Whitespire anyway.”

The Man in Black seemed to waver for a moment, eyes drifting to his sword. Julia watched his hands carefully. “Fine,” he said curtly. “Take me to see him. But I don’t trust you.”

Julia grinned. She loved winning. “Perfect,” she chirped. “I don’t trust you either.” And she skipped off. 

The Man in Black retrieved his sword from the ground and hurried to walk at her side, still looking suspicious. At least, as far as Julia could tell through the mask. “You know,” she said, “You seem awfully invested in this whole thing. I’ve never seen someone climb up a cliff like that just cause they hate kidnapping and love justice.”

He was silent for a while, long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Maybe it isn’t justice that I love.”

Interesting. 

She stopped at the bottom of a hill, thrusting out her arm to halt him as well. “If I know Margo,” she confided, “she’ll be waiting at the top of that hill to chuck boulders down at you. Wait here.”

“ _Boulders_?” The Man in Black repeated incredulously. “She’ll chuck _boulders_?”

“Well, with magic, obviously. Now hush.” She stepped forward, in view of the peak. “HEY, MARGO!” she called. 

A brief pause. Then: “WHAT?” echoed down the hill. 

“I GOT THE MAN IN BLACK HERE. I THINK HE’S COOL. DON’T KILL HIM, OKAY?”

“FUCKING WHAT?”

“I SAID HE’S COOL DON’T KILL HIM!”

“OH, FOR-” A small figure shimmered into view on top of the hill as Margo dropped her cloaking spell. She stormed down the slope toward them, somehow conveying with each step how royally pissed she was even while picking her way over the rocky terrain. 

Julia and the Man in Black were left to stand beside each other in awkward silence while Margo made her way to them. “So, uh,” he said eventually. “Loria, huh? How did you get into the war incitement business anyway?”

“Oh, it runs in the family.”

“What, really?”

Julia snorted. “No, idiot. That was a joke.”

“Oh.”

“ALRIGHT,” Margo shouted, then winced and adjusted her volume. She was standing before them now, hands on her hips. “Alright. Clearly one of us has been woefully fucking misinformed on the particulars of this gig, cause I was under the impression we weren’t here to make friends.”

Julia weighed the pros and cons of pointing out that they’d already made friends with Eliot. 

“Friends is a strong word,” said the Man in Black. 

“Yeah? Well so is _dead_ , which is what you’re supposed to be.” She glared at him, then at Julia. 

Julia sighed. “Do you really wanna go around murdering people without even learning their names first?” _She_ certainly didn’t, anyway. She hoped Margo didn’t, either, but honestly it was hard to tell sometimes. 

Margo looked him up and down. “Hey shit-for-brains, what’s your name?” she asked. 

“None of your business.”

“Uh-huh. I see the problem,” Margo said flatly. “How could you kill anyone this goddamn charming?”

“Come on, he just wants to talk to Eliot,” Julia reasoned. “There’s no harm in that. Once he sees that Eliot’s perfectly happy to be here, he can just leave us alone.”

Margo narrowed her eye at him, the beads on her embroidered eyepatch glinting. “What, you know El or something?”

He looked down at the ground for a moment before meeting her eye again. “Or something,” he said softly. 

Very interesting. 

~

“Wait, Fezzick has an eyepatch?”

“Uh-huh,” says Papa. 

“That’s badass,” says Teddy. 

“Language.”

“It’s _so_ badass,” agrees Papa. 

“Oh my god.”

“Fezzick and Inigo are definitely the coolest,” Teddy decides. His fathers look terribly pleased for some reason. 

~

They trekked a little ways over the hilly terrain in pursuit of Alice and Eliot. It didn’t take long to find them; they seemed to have stopped for lunch. 

A simple picnic — bread, cheese, a few stone fruits, two goblets, a bottle of wine — was spread out on a cloth on top of a large, flat rock. Behind it, on two smaller rocks, sat Eliot, wearing a blindfold, and Alice, pressing a dagger to his throat. 

“Not another move, pirate,” Alice spat. “One step closer and I bleed him dry.” 

Eliot raised his bound hands to wave politely at them, looking bored behind the blindfold. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Eliot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, a bitch that can’t write action: i think i will really focus on this swordfight scene for some reason
> 
> anyway i absolutely made up everything i said about sword magic from whole cloth but if they’re not going to explore the mechanics of the magic system then by god i am going to speculate


	4. The Hills

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *warns everyone that i can't promise regular updates and then ends up posting chapters roughly once a week anyway*

“Drop the act, Alice,” Margo sighed. “He’s not here to foil our dastardly plans or whatever the fuck.”

“Well, um, I might very much be here to do that, actually,” he argued. “You know, depending on what those plans are. It’s a conditional foiling.”

“Oh my god,” groaned Margo, “you are the biggest dork I have ever met. And I roll with _this_ geek ass motherfucker.” She jerked her chin toward Julia, who just grinned, unperturbed. Dork. 

Alice’s hand tightened on the dagger. “If someone doesn’t explain to me what’s going on in the next ten seconds, I’m severing his carotid.”

Eliot looked mournful. “Oh, but this is such a nice shirt.”

Julia patted the Man in Black on the shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Alice is just bluffing.”

God, what, were they pals now? Why was this guy so keen on El? And why was Alice acting unhinged? Margo was beginning to feel like the only one who hadn’t lost her mind around here. She looked over at Eliot. At least he seemed just as puzzled as she was. Though that might’ve been because he couldn’t see shit. 

“I don’t enjoy being accused of bluffing,” Alice said, pressing on the blade just enough to make Eliot wince. “Almost as much as I don’t enjoy my own associates fucking up our plans by inviting random idiots along for playdates.”

The Man in Black straightened up to his full (unimpressive) height and squared his (eh) shoulders. “I want assurance of the prince’s safety.”

Alice looked surprised for a moment before her eyes narrowed again. “Or what?”

“Well, I’m pretty sure the implication is that I’ll kill you and rescue him. Sorry, was that not clear?”

“Oh my god,” said Eliot, “This conversation is going to kill me before anyone else gets the chance. Can you just come to some sort of agreement already?”

The Man in Black crossed his arms and cocked his hips bitchily. “You know, you don’t seem very afraid for your life,” he said. 

And it wasn’t especially dignified, but Margo couldn’t help it. She snorted with laughter.

~

No one in their right mind climbed the Cliffs of Insanity — the name wasn’t just a gimmick, it was a warning. But Fen supposed it only made sense that whoever had kidnapped Eliot wouldn’t be in their right mind. 

If they had laid a finger on him, she swore, they would soon find themselves in no mind at all. 

Fen crouched, inspecting the disturbed gravel. “There was a duel here,” she said. “Between two accomplished fighters. Likely masters of the sword.”

“How can you possibly tell that?” Count Reynard asked, his tone thick with cloying condescension. 

Fen stood, wiping the dirt from her palms. “See there?” she asked. “Footprints, marking out the patterns of footwork associated with traditional Fillorian swordplay. And there, more footwork, this time in a foreign style. And here-” she took a fistful of red-flecked gravel from the ground and thrust it toward him. “-blood. Not enough lost to be dangerous, but enough to suggest it was spilled intentionally.” She let the bloody gravel cascade to his feet. “Don’t forget, Count Reynard, that I was not always a princess. I crafted blades before I met you.” 

A thin smile crept across the Count’s face, and it was a concentrated effort not to reach for the stiletto at her belt. “Of course, My Lady,” he agreed, his yellow eyes shrewd and ugly. “Do please continue your work.”

She withdrew to observe the ground again, her guts simmering uncomfortably. She felt as though she had given something away, played into his hands somehow, but every interaction with Count Reynard left her feeling that way. She would be doubly relieved when this search was over.

For now, though, she bit her tongue and mounted her horse. “This way,” she said, urging it forward. 

“You don’t suppose this could be a trap?” Count Reynard asked from behind her, his stupid, smug, sickly voice crawling up her spine like insects. Diseased insects. 

She pursed her lips. “No more a trap than any other, at least,” she said, and broke into a canter.

~

They did come to an arrangement, eventually. Margo wasn’t clear on the particulars of how, mostly because the particulars didn’t make any actual sense, and neither did anything else about the situation. Alice was clearly stalling for time, here, trying to get a read on this guy before choosing a course of action. And Margo could respect that, sure. But she would’ve really preferred, just once, for a job with this crew to go the way it was supposed to. They should’ve been halfway to Loria by now. Halfway to receiving a hefty paycheck from their shady unnamed employer. 

By the time Margo was done picking dirt from under her nails, it was decided that Alice and the Man in Black would compete in some kind of battle of wits. The object being, the Man in Black had been led to believe, Eliot’s life. Ha.

The Man in black drew a small pouch from his pocket. “This,” he said, “is iocane powder. I’m sure you are familiar.”

Alice’s eyebrow quirked up. “Of course. It’s a deadly poison, entirely undetectable and with no known antidote.”

“Exactly. Pour the wine.”

Alice did so. 

The Man in Black took both goblets and the pouch and turned away, holding them out of Alice’s line of sight. He stared pointedly at Julia and Margo. 

“What?” said Margo. “Do your thing. We won’t tell.”

He stared at them some more. 

“Right, let’s just…” Julia grabbed Margo by the elbow and pulled her to the other side of the makeshift table, behind Alice and Eliot. “Alright,” she said, “we can’t see now.” 

Margo smacked Julia’s hand away and sneered. She wasn’t really worried; Alice wasn’t going to let herself be poisoned by some idiot with a bad mustache. But that didn’t mean she cared to be _manhandled_. She sat down beside Eliot and found a comfortable position to enjoy the show. 

The Man in Black turned back around and set everything down, one cup before him, one before Alice, and the now empty pouch between them. “So: where’s the poison?” He crossed his arms. “The battle has begun. It ends when we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.”

Alice drew herself up. “Simple enough,” she said, her chin taking that arrogant little tilt that Margo hated to have directed at her, but sadistically enjoyed seeing directed at others. “All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet, or his enemy's?”

Oh, this was gonna be good. Margo smirked over at Julia, whose lips twitched as she leaned back against a tree. 

“Now,” Alice began, “a clever man would put the poison into his _own_ goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what they were given. I'm not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of _you_. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of _me_.”

The Man in Black nodded. “You’ve made your decision, then?”

“Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows. And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of _you_.”

“O… kay,” he said. “That’s a lot to consider for a situation with only two options.”

“Just wait until I get going!” said Alice, clearly getting into the spirit of this. “Where was I?”

“Australia.”

“Yes, Australia! And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of _me_!” Alice’s voice was rising in pitch now, each new conclusion stated with a manic certainty. Margo grinned and nudged Eliot, whose determinedly straight face was beginning to slip.

“I- this is crazy. You’re just stalling now,” said the Man in Black. 

Alice stood abruptly. “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you!” She glared at him with wild eyes. “You scaled the Cliffs of Insanity, which means you’re strong, so you could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting in your strength to save you. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of _you_. But you also held your own against Julia, which means you must have studied. And in studying, you must have learned that man is mortal so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of _me_!”

“Oh my god,” the Man in Black groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Can you please just pick one? This is nonsense. I’m not gonna give anything away.”

“It’s too late,” Alice said, gesturing over her goblet. “You’ve given everything away. I know where the poison is.” She sat, suddenly the picture of serenity. “Shall we drink?”

He looked up and blinked, clearly puzzled. “I... yeah. Let’s.”

Margo muffled laughter into Eliot’s shoulder. He leaned into her lazily. 

Alice and the Man in Black drank at once, draining their cups fully. Then they sat and stared at each other. There was a beat of silence. 

Then another. 

Then another. 

Then-

“Why is nothing happening?” asked the Man in Black. 

Margo bit down on the inside of her cheek. 

“Oh,” said Alice, “It was in my cup, then?”

“Just tell me why nothing is happening.”

Alice shrugged. “I had no idea which one you poisoned,” she admitted. “So I said a bunch of bullshit to distract you and then cast a purification spell on my cup when you weren’t looking.”

“Wh- but that’s cheating!” He looked hilariously scandalized.

“That’s survival. You’re the one who tried to poison me.”

“Oh. Well, no,” The Man in Black confessed sheepishly, “it wasn’t really iocane. Just sleeping powder.”

“Nutsack,” said Margo.

“And it was in both cups. I’ve kind of built up a tolerance to it, anyway.”

“Double nutsack,” said Margo.

“My dear Margo,” Eliot drawled, “you are always so eloquent.”

She grinned. 

And the Man in Black — stared at Eliot. The apple of his throat bobbed. The lines of his face went soft. And something bloomed there, half-hidden behind his mask, but unmistakable in its depth. 

Huh. 

“Shall we call this a draw,” he asked, eyes still on Eliot. 

“I think we can call ourselves both cheaters,” Alice responded. “I’m not sure about the rest.”

“Look,” said Eliot, “if your little game is over, can we drop the charade? I’m losing circulation here.”

“Right, sorry.” Alice took the dagger she had held to his throat earlier and used it to cut his bindings. 

“Thanks.” Eliot removed his blindfold and ran a skeptical eye over the Man in Black. “Huh,” he concluded, “you’re shorter than you sound.”

The Man in Black smiled, unaccountably fond. It was no wonder he wore a mask, if his face always spoke this loud. “And you have poor manners for a prince,” he said, with no bite in his tone. He turned to Alice. “Your associates were being truthful? He’s in no danger with you?”

Alice shrugged. “No more than usual, anyway. Maybe less than he was in at the palace.”

He nodded. “You wish to stay with them?” he asked Eliot. And, well, alright. This guy was pretty close to earning himself the ranking of _not so bad, actually_ in Margo’s book. 

“Well, I didn’t say _that_ ,” replied Eliot. “I mean, you’re perfectly fine people, really,” he told Alice and Julia, “except for _you_ ,” he said to Margo. “You are a delightful little nightmare and I can’t get enough of you.” Margo preened. 

“But,” he continued, “presumably you’re going back to Fillory when this is all over.” They all assented. He sighed. “I can’t return there, or Ember will find me. I’m sure he’s sent his knights after me already. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d really prefer they didn’t catch me.”

“I have a ship,” the Man in Black said. “I can give you safe passage. Anywhere you want to go.”

“Anywhere?”

“Anywhere.”

Eliot looked at him for a moment longer, and then at Margo. She shrugged. He dressed like a pirate, but the guy seemed harmless as far as she could tell. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I boarded a strange ship.”

“I guess we don’t strictly _need_ you to complete the rest of the plan,” allowed Alice, “We’re off of Fillorian soil, which is the important part. We can magic up a fake corpse without you, and you can sail off to parts unknown. Just don’t get caught.”

“Believe me,” said Eliot, “I have no such intention.”

“Nor do I,” agreed the Man in Black. 

“So it’s settled?” asked Julia. “We split up here, then finish our mission and collect our paycheck?”

“Seems so,” said Alice.

Margo took Eliot’s hand and squeezed once before letting go. “Hey, look me up if you’re ever back in Fillory,” she said quietly. “I mean, don’t be back in Fillory for a while, or you’ll get your ass dragged right back to Whitespire. But after you’re officially dead and the dust settles and everything, you know where you can find me.”

He smiled warmly down at her. “Of course,” he said. “You know, if I don’t _actually_ die traversing the high seas or something.” He kissed her cheek. 

And the Man in Black watched them, his shadowed eyes soft. 

“Alright,” said Margo. She rose to her feet, pulling Eliot up with her. “If you’re gonna go, you’d better go now. If anyone’s after you, we’ve already wasted too much time with these dumbass shenanigans. Let’s get a move on before we all end up hanged and/or heterosexually married.”

Eliot nodded. “Seconded.” He began to move away, but Alice stood and caught him by the arm. 

“Wait,” she said, then pursed her lips for a moment. “Just... be very careful to evade the king’s forces. And not only for the sake of our professional reputation. This job has felt strange from the start; I meant it when I said the palace may not be safe.”

Their eyes held for a solemn moment, and then the corner of his mouth quirked up, just slightly. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why?”

She sighed and released his arm to cross hers over her chest. “I would, really. But I don’t actually know anything yet. I need to pursue some leads first.” She flicked glances at Margo and Julia, who nodded in understanding. They didn’t like to associate too brazenly with Fillorians United; a reputation like that was bad for the freelance business. And for their necks. But the spy network certainly came in handy, if you garnered the right favors in the right places. 

“I swear, a job is never straightforward with you people,” Margo complained. The atmosphere was getting a little tense for her liking. 

“You love it,” said Julia, smiling her insufferably pleasant smile. “You’d get bored otherwise.”

“Whatever. Next time I’m taking point.”

And on that note, they parted.

~

The ground rolled before them, a sprawling cacophony of hills and valleys sloping haphazardly downward from the crest of the cliffs. Soon, Fen knew, they would reach sea level, where the ground would turn to mud and muck and the foliage would crowd together so densely as to block out the sun. The Fire Swamp, the place was called, and every child who grew up for miles around it had heard the horror stories. Quicksand that swallowed you up in seconds, flames that sprung from the ground. Rodents Of Unusual Size. 

Fen hoped they would find Eliot before they reached the swamp; anyone mad enough to scale the Cliffs of Insanity might be mad enough to enter the Fire Swamp as well, and there was far too high a chance he wouldn’t survive there. 

She dismounted beside a flat rock atop a little knoll. A peach sat forgotten on the ground. She picked it up. “Not even bruised,” she murmured. “Someone was here very recently.” She set it gently on the rock, feeling inexplicably as though she should take care with the fragile thing, and turned to the rest of the party. “We’re close,” she announced. “It won’t be long until we have them.”

“May justice be served,” said Count Reynard, with none of the weight the sentiment demanded. He looked carelessly amused. 

Fen climbed back into her saddle. “It will be,” she said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

~

They walked along the top of a long, steep ridge, their path uneven and interrupted occasionally by large rocks that jutted from the ground at odd angles. It was starkly beautiful, as though the rugged vertebrae of the very earth were showing through. It was also sort of inconvenient for two people in a hurry to evade capture, but at least Eliot could appreciate the aesthetics of the place while he stumbled around like a dumbass in pursuit of freedom. 

The Man in Black hadn’t said much, but Eliot had noticed him darting furtive little glances his way as they walked. Eliot hadn’t known pirates could be _shy_ , but apparently this one was, judging by the uncertain quality of his silence. 

It had been quiet for some time when the Man in Black cleared his throat and asked, “So, how long have you known Margo?”

Eliot blinked, caught off guard. “Oh, I haven’t. We just met yesterday, when she kidnapped me.”

The Man in Black tripped over a rise in the ground. Eliot reflexively caught his shoulders to keep him upright. “Thank you,” The Man in Black said, twisting his head to look back at him. “But- yesterday? You acted as though you were old friends.”

Eliot shrugged. “I bond fast.” He released his shoulders with a distant pang of — reluctance, perhaps? A pang of something he didn’t quite understand. “And for life,” he added, just to fill the spacious silence.

“Is that so?” the Man in Black asked very quietly. It sounded as though he meant it as an actual question.

So Eliot answered. “It is.” 

They walked on for a minute more. Then the Man in Black spoke again, sounding hesitant. “You seem glad to be away from Whitespire.” He tilted his chin to look sideways up at Eliot. “Why is that? Was royal life so unpleasant?” 

Eliot let out a sharp laugh. The reality of his circumstances hadn’t _quite_ set in yet, but he was expecting them to any moment, if the edge of hysteria he could hear in his own voice was any indication. “I never asked to be royal in the first place,” he said. “I never wanted to go to Whitespire. I was taken there against my will, and forcibly betrothed to, to…” Ah. And there it was: reality. Eliot was wandering through the wilderness, on the run from Ember’s men, with no company but a masked pirate and no hope of ever again seeing- “Fen,” he said, “oh, god, Fen. She’s all alone now. She never asked for any of this, either. My only friend in the world and I’m just abandoning her.” 

Suddenly it was all too much. He needed- just for a moment, he needed to sit down. He stumbled forward, found a rock suitable for sitting on, and collapsed onto it. “I wish I could go back to the castle,” he said, pressing his face into his hands. “Invite her to escape with me. Or at least give her a proper goodbye. Oh, shit, she must be so worried.” 

“You… love the princess?” Eliot looked up to find the Man in Black watching him, concern tightening the corners of his mouth, arms bent at the elbows and hovering like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. The posture struck him as oddly familiar, and he shook his head to clear it. 

“Of course I do,” he replied. “Fen has been a dear friend to me. But I could never love her the way a husband is meant to, and I doubt she could love me that way either.” He heaved a sigh. “I just wish I wasn’t leaving her there at Whitespire without anyone to trust. But there's nothing I can do; for all we know they’ve nearly caught up to us already. Actually, we’d better hurry up.” 

The Man in Black offered a hand to help him up, and Eliot took it. “There’s no need to worry,” he said, as they began walking again. “The Muntjac is the fastest ship on the seas. And I’m sure we could find a way to send word to Princess Fen, tell her you’re alright; you can start writing a letter as soon as we get onboard… Eliot?” 

Eliot had frozen in his tracks. He hadn’t done so consciously; his legs had simply stopped carrying him forward. They’d seized up beneath him as his blood turned to ice, and then- and then. And then to magma, burning through his veins so hot his skin ought to blister with it, raising a searing pain within him that until now had, had nearly, had almost, had _god, please,_ quieted. 

“The Muntjac,” said Eliot. 

The Man in Black tensed almost imperceptibly. “Did, um. Did I say the Muntjac?” 

“The _Muntjac_ ,” Eliot spat, the word tasting foul on his tongue, “Is the vessel of the Dread Pirate Roberts.” 

“Ah. Well, yes. I, uh, I suppose it is.” 

“And it is your ship. Which makes you, _I suppose_ , the illustrious Dread Pirate Roberts himself.” 

The Man in Black eyed him warily. “So I’ve been told.” 

Eliot’s legs thawed beneath him and he walked swiftly back the way they had come. He heard frenzied footsteps behind him but he didn’t turn. 

“Hold on, wait a minute, just-” a hand grasped at Eliot’s elbow and he wrenched it off, snarling. 

“Don’t touch me,” he growled. “And don’t follow me either. I don’t want your help. I don’t want your safe passage. All I want from you is your slow and painful death.” 

The Dread Pirate Roberts stepped back cautiously. “Eliot,” he said, hands raised in placation. “Just wait a minute, let me-” 

“You murdered the only man I have ever truly loved. Five years ago. Do you even remember him? Or have you taken so many lives that it left no impression on you?” He could feel tears welling in his eyes, hot as fire, hot as his boiling blood. His hands itched to cast something deadly. “His name was Quentin, and he was everything to me, and you _took him from me_.” 

Roberts nodded slowly. “I remember him. He…” his hands fell to his sides, clenching into fists for a moment before relaxing. “He asked to be spared.” 

Eliot choked out an ugly, broken laugh. “Did he, now. And, what, you enjoy when your victims beg?” He sneered. “Is that what caught your memory?” 

“No. He didn’t beg at all. Just said, ‘Please, I need to live.’ And then he explained why.” The Man in Black, in some sickening show of evil pride or pleasure, smiled. “True love, he said. A man he could not bear to leave. A man with a sharp wit, and a sharper tongue, and a heart no less beautiful for being guarded. A man he would always come back to.” 

Eliot felt as though he were coming apart piece by piece; he wanted nothing more than to make the villain before him feel the same. In a more literal fashion, ideally. “Do you tell me this to mock me?” he hissed. “Or do you simply derive pleasure from the memory?” 

“Eliot, please, I’m trying to-” and he paused, staring into the distance. “A dust cloud,” he muttered. “A party on horseback, perhaps? We should-” 

“You,” spat Eliot, possessed with the rage of his unearthed grief, “should _die_.” And he shoved Roberts hard in the chest, sending him careening, helpless, down the slope. 

The reply came in a shout as the Dread Pirate Roberts tumbled head over heels into the ravine: “AS… YOU… WISH!” 

Eliot felt the world shift on its axis as his heart shuddered out a shaky thud for what felt like the first time in years. And then, less romantically, he gasped so hard he choked on his own spit. “QUENTIN?” he cried between coughs, “WHAT THE FUCK!” And he hurled himself unthinking down the slope after him. 

~ 

Teddy sits bolt upright. "What! Westley's alive?" 

Dad just nods, grinning. 

Teddy looks to Papa. " _What_?" 

"I know, right?" Papa agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am absolutely vicariously dunking on jason ralph and his dumb mustache, and i will only continue to do so. this i vow. eliot gets to bully him next


	5. The Swamp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> normally i don’t publish a chapter until i have the next one fully drafted but 1. it’s been two weeks 2. i ended chapter four in a really mean place and 3. it’s my own rule which means i can break it. 
> 
> that does mean chapter six may take a while too but. well. 
> 
> this week on Things I Spent More Time Googling Than Was Strictly Necessary: medieval laundry practices

“But why would he throw himself after Westley?” Teddy asks, baffled. “Couldn’t he just, like, _walk_?”

“Absolutely not,” Papa disagrees. “Where’s the drama in that?”

Teddy crosses his arms. “Buttercup’s gonna get a concussion if he isn’t careful.”

“You know, you sound _just_ like your Dad sometimes.”

“How very tragic,” says Dad.

~

“So,” said Margo,

~

“Wait a second, you’re going back to Fezzick now? You just told us Westley’s alive and now you’re switching to someone else?”

“I’m building narrative tension.”

Teddy stares at the ceiling. “You’re testing me, is what you’re doing.”

“Now _that_ ,” says Papa, “he could’ve gotten from either one of us.”

~

“So,” said Margo eventually, “Do you ever plan to tell us why this gig’s got your bra strap all twisted? Cause I’ll bear the suspense for about another twenty minutes before I break out the interrogation techniques.”

Alice looked over and sighed to see her colleagues eyeing her expectantly as they walked. She appreciated their perseverant natures, she really did. Margo and Julia were the only people she had ever met who were both as brutally efficient and as implacably determined as she was, and those qualities made their little team fearsome to reckon with. She just wished they would have some fucking patience sometimes. “I already said I don’t know anything for certain. It’s just a feeling I have.”

“Alice, please.” Julia sounded exasperated. “We know you. You wouldn’t have said something over _just a feeling_. So come on.”

Alice chewed her lip. She had been the one contacted about the job; it was why she was heading this mission. That was how their team functioned. So Margo and Julia hadn’t been present for that somewhat unsettling transaction. “The man who hired us,” she began. “He was... well, he was clearly a proxy. Nothing too unusual about that. But the way he hesitated any time I asked questions, it was like- it was like he wasn’t the only proxy, like the initial order had become so muddled from person to person that he couldn’t be sure what he was supposed to ask of us. I mean, he didn’t even know whether we were meant to kidnap Eliot or the princess. Whoever our true employer is may have gone to great lengths to conceal their identity.”

“Huh,” said Margo. “A mystery? I like it. But there’s more than that, or you wouldn’t be acting so squirrely.”

“I’m not acting squirrely!”

Margo and Julia exchanged a look. Assholes. 

“Fine,” Alice said. “There was something else off about him. It was like he didn’t belong. He was dressed in common clothes, but his shoes didn’t look worn at all. There was barely any dirt on them.” Julia and Margo exchanged another look, knowing this time rather than patronizing. “And when he came close to give me the initial payment, I caught a whiff of lavender and aniseed.”

“Lavender and aniseed,” Margo repeated slowly. “Like they use to scent the laundry at Castle Whitespire.” 

Alice nodded. “I thought I remembered you telling me about that.”

“Well, thank god for flings with palace guards. You always learn something useful.”

“But it’s still not enough to go on,” protested Alice. “This all means nothing; we can’t accuse some shadowy figure in Whitespire of conspiring to start a war on the basis of scented laundry. We have no evidence. And even if we did, we’d be killed for it.”

“Which is why we need to talk to Fillorians United,” concluded Julia. “If there really is a conspiracy, we could use each other’s help.”

“Alright,” Margo said decisively. “So first we’ll finish up this fake-Eliot’s-murder thing. Then we can collect the paycheck, which will give us an opportunity to try to learn more about our employer. Alice, you’re on that, since the proxy has already met you. Julia, you’ll set up a meeting with the FU. And I’ll finagle my way into Whitespire and see if any guards or servants have overheard anything strange.”

“Wow, okay, Queen Margo,” Julia said, sounding amused more than anything. 

“Damn right,” said Margo. “I said I’d be taking point this time.”

Alice really _did_ appreciate them. 

~

Throwing himself into a ravine had not, perhaps, been the wisest course of action.

When they had both finally rolled to a stop at the bottom, dirty and disheveled, the black mask nowhere to be found, Quentin crawled frantically to Eliot and cradled his head, checking for injuries. “Why did you do that? You could’ve been hurt! Are you okay, can you move?”

“Move?” Eliot’s voice wavered, thick with emotion. “You’re alive, Q; I could _fly_ if you asked me to.”

Quentin’s broad, dimpled grin was like seeing sunlight for the first time in five years. It was like remembering how to breathe. Like falling in love again. Even through the haze of his tears, and Quentin's own, which had already spilled over. “I mean, it would be convenient if you could.”

“Shut up.” Eliot pulled him down into a long, breathless kiss, releasing him only when his lungs began to ache, then buried his face in his neck. “You were dead,” he whispered, “you were _dead_.”

“Not quite,” said Quentin. “Just kidnapped, really.”

“Well, there’s certainly a lot of that going around.”

Quentin chuckled into his hair. “God, I missed you. Even death couldn’t keep me from you, Eliot, you have to know that. Nothing can stop true love. Just delay it for a little while.”

“You are the cheesiest person I’ve ever met in my life,” Eliot said, valiantly pretending that he was not openly weeping. “I’ll never doubt you again.”

“I’ll never give you a reason to.”

“Just promise me one thing, Quentin, darling.”

“Name it and it’s yours.”

Eliot cupped his face with gentle hands, gazed at him with gentle eyes. “Please shave off that awful mustache.”

Quentin laughed, bright and joyful. "As you wish, my love." And he kissed him again.

~

Papa’s arms are around Dad’s shoulders, his face nestled into his hair, their eyes closed as they hold each other. 

Some nights, when Teddy can't fall asleep, he looks out the window to watch his fathers work on the mosaic. The easy tedium of it usually has him dozing in minutes. One such night he found them, instead, standing on a finished pattern, wrapped in each other's arms, swaying gently as if to unheard music. It was all at once a strange and comforting sight, in a way Teddy doesn't really know how to name. They look like that now.

Which is all very well and good, except they are supposed to be telling Teddy a story right now. “They’re going to the Fire Swamp, right?” he prompts. “You said there was a Fire Swamp. That sounded cool.”

“Hmm? Right,” says Dad. “That’s the next stop on the journey.”

“Buttercup gets to be very brave and heroic there, if I recall correctly,” adds Papa. 

“Sure, yeah. He does.” Dad takes Papa’s hand and kisses it, then holds it in his lap as he continues. “So, the Fire Swamp.”

~

A party on horseback emerged at the crest of the valley they’d been walking through, and Eliot’s hand tightened in Quentin’s. “Don’t worry,” Quentin reassured him, “they’re too late. A few more steps and we’ll be safe in the Fire Swamp.”

“Safe,” Eliot said flatly. “In the _Fire Swamp_.”

“Yeah, well… safety is relative, right? Would you rather take your chances with the swamp or with King Ember?”

Eliot responded by striding forward, dragging Quentin along by their linked hands. “Let’s go.”

“I mean, that wasn’t rhetorical, we really can turn back if you-”

“Not a chance. I’m not having them hang you. Let’s _go_.”

The Fire Swamp was a sprawling, gloomy tangle of trees and vines growing thickly atop a vast mire. The air was humid and the light barely touched the ground as it filtered through the dense canopy. The whole place hummed and gargled with strange sounds and it reeked of rot and sulfur. 

“It’s not that bad,” said Quentin. 

The look Eliot gave him was absolutely withering. 

“What? I’m not saying we should build a summer home right here but, like, it’s alright." He shrugged awkwardly. "The trees are kind of nice.”

The withering look continued. 

“I’m just trying to be positive.”

Eliot rolled his eyes. “I wish I had better taste in men.”

"I'm so incredibly glad you don't."

They picked their way over the rocks and roots, Quentin cutting through curtains of vines with his sword. He hoped the edge wouldn’t become dulled from the foliage. He was very fond of his sword. They were making steady progress when suddenly there came a snapping, popping sound, and then-

“Son of a bitch!” Eliot threw his cloak to the ground and stamped on it to put out the fire. He’d stumbled across a flame spurt, a jet in the ground which periodically released tongues of flame taller than most men. Eliot plucked the singed cloak off the ground to observe the damage. “Ruined,” he said mournfully. “I really liked this cloak.”

“We’ll get you a new one later. Just- let’s get away from here.” Quentin pushed forward through the swamp, and — _snap! pop!_ — and then strong arms were lifting him off the ground and setting him down safely as flames leapt from where he had just stood. He cleared his throat. “Um. Huh. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, dear,” Eliot said, his tone utterly casual, his arms still wrapped tightly around Quentin’s waist. “Do try not to give me a heart attack, though.”

“Right. I’ll do my best.”

They traveled on, careful of the flame spurts, catching up on years past as well as they could while they walked.

“So you see,” Quentin explained, “it’s really more of an inherited title than anything. The Dread Pirate Roberts wasn’t the first Dread Pirate Roberts, and neither was the man who held the title before him. I don’t know why he chose me to follow him. Maybe that was his intention from the moment he let me live. Maybe not. Either way, I spent three years in his service, learning to fence and fight and whatever else the crew would teach me, before he told me the truth.” They edged sideways over a tree branch bridging a sick-smelling stream of swampy water. Their hands were clasped for balance, or for safety, or simply because they hadn’t let go of each other since the close call with the flame spurts.

“And that was when he offered you the title?” Eliot asked as they planted their feet on solid ground again. At least, what passed for solid ground here.

“Yes. He said he wanted to retire in comfort. Turns out piracy is pretty lucrative, if you don’t mind the high turnover rate.”

“And by ‘high turnover rate’, you mean the danger of getting stabbed and/or hanged.”

Quentin shrugged. “Well, yes. That.” They picked their way around masses of dead and rotting things that had once been plant life. At least, Quentin hoped that was what they had been. “So he named me the new Roberts and gave me the captaincy, just like that. The crew all know, of course, but they don’t speak of it. They know as well as I do that our success relies largely on the fearsome reputation of the Dread Pirate Roberts, so they won’t do anything to upset things. Even though a lot of them are definitely way more qualified for the position than I am.”

Eliot was contemplative for a moment. “You’ve been Roberts for two years, then?” he asked.

“Yes.” Quentin squeezed his hand once, tightly. “I spent them searching for you, you know.”

“Searching for me?”

“I went back to Indiana the first chance I got. My first mate, Asmodeus, made my excuses for me once I explained to her why I needed to go. I thought- it wasn’t the way we’d planned to run away together, I know, but the _together_ of it was the important part, really. So I went to find you.”

“And I wasn’t there.” Eliot sounded heartbroken. “Oh, Q.”

“It had been three years," he continued, remembering the sad, empty state of the farm. Eliot's family had still been there, of course, and the animals, and the crops were doing well enough. It had been empty nonetheless. "No one knew where you had gone. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know how to search for you. I nearly lost hope. Then, by chance, I docked in Fillory, where I heard tell of Prince Eliot Waugh and his impending nuptials. So I learned everything I could — including that there was a plot to kidnap you. Uh, or possibly Princess Fen? It was really unclear.”

Eliot snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

“Well, anyway.” Quentin tugged Eliot against him and wrapped an arm around his waist. “I’ve found you now, and I don’t intend to misplace you again.”

Eliot smiled warmly down at him. God, Quentin had missed that sight. He'd even missed the ache he got from craning his neck all the time to see it. “If we get kidnapped again," Eliot promised, "we’ll do it together this time.”

“Exactly,” he said, and stood on his toes to seal their agreement with a firm kiss on the mouth.

“It was silly of you to misplace me, really,” Eliot said when they parted. He took a few steps forward, grinning back at Quentin over his shoulder. “I’m far too large to be easily- augh!” He cried out as he was swallowed by a patch of white sand.

Quentin wasted a vacant moment blinking dumbly in shock at the place where Eliot had just stood. Then he grabbed hold of a hanging vine and dove in after him.

~

She might have been a smug, squirrely, secretive pain in the ass sometimes, but when it came right down to it, Alice was usually right. Well, about factual matters, anyway. Margo didn’t feel particularly inclined to comment on her ethics. Or Julia’s. Or her own.

Anyway, Alice was usually right, and at the moment that meant two things: firstly, that there was most certainly a political conspiracy afoot, and one they should probably hurry to investigate for their own sakes. And secondly, faking a death really _was_ pretty easy.

The important part was producing a believable corpse, which was a lot like building a golem, only since it didn’t have to be animate you could really cheap out on the building materials. You didn’t even have to use real living clay, just imbue some regular clay with sufficient magic so it could hold the necessary spells long enough to fool people. That done, they dragged fake Eliot’s fake body onto a Lorian beach (“Okay, does anyone else feel a little weird about this?” Margo asked), stuck a dagger imprinted with the royal Lorian seal between its fake ribs (“Yeah, this is definitely super weird,” Julia agreed), and left it there to be discovered. That, they had been assured, would be taken care of by their employer.

So that was that. Job done. They were sailing home before they knew it. 

Now it was time to _really_ get their hands dirty. “Alright, bitches,” said Margo. “Let’s get political.”

~

Eliot hated the Fire Swamp.

Seriously, fuck the place. And basically everywhere else he had ever been, really. Eliot had had it up to here with all of it. And by _up to here_ , he meant approximately six feet above his head. Which was where the ground was, currently.

He groped blindly for purchase, but the sand only shifted around him, offering nothing solid, no escape. It filled his nose. It filled his mouth. He was going to die here. After everything that had happened, all he had been through, he was going to die here, drowned in the fucking ground. Honestly, it seemed a little anticlimactic. 

He was just beginning to feel truly insulted by the situation when an arm looped around his waist, pulling him toward a familiar body. Hands found his and guided them to- a rope? No, a vine. He grabbed hold of it and began to pull himself upward, his lungs burning, his arms shaking, fueled by a desperation for air and an indignant refusal to die somewhere so goddamn ugly.

The first lungful of air was exactly as much of a relief as any simile on the subject would lead one to believe. Eliot gasped, and gasped, and coughed up sand, and gasped some more. Then he collapsed on the ground, still panting. Quentin lay beside him, equally winded.

“Please tell me you have come to despise this place like a sensible person,” Eliot demanded.

“Yeah, we’re definitely gonna have to find another spot for our summer home.”

“Mm. Somewhere tropical?”

“Deal.”

Eliot’s fantasies of fruity drinks and nude sunbathing and sand that didn’t try to kill you were interrupted by a rustling overhead. His eyes darted about for the source of it and landed upon what looked for all the world like a giant rat, the size of a large dog, creeping along a branch. Truly, this place was an endless fucking cavalcade of whimsical horrors. “Uh, Q? Don’t look now, but I think I just spotted a R.O.U.S.”

“What? A Rodent Of Unusual Size? No way those things are real.”

Eliot, who was officially fed up in case anyone was keeping score, just pointed.

Quentin followed with his gaze. “Oh, shit. Let’s, um. Maybe let’s just not provoke it?”

They lay very still, waiting for the R.O.U.S. to disappear. _Cloudless skies_ , Eliot told himself as it lumbered along noisily. _Bottomless cocktails. Applying each other’s sunscreen_.

Once it was gone, Eliot stood, dragging Q up with him. “If we die here,” he said, “I am going to be so very put out.”

“Me too,” said Quentin. “I, like, _just_ got you back.”

“Mhmm. It would be very narratively unsatisfying.”

“So let’s just not die then,” Quentin concluded, settling the matter. He gave Eliot a goofy grin, his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Actually, I think we’re pretty much kicking the Fire Swamp’s ass,” he went on. “Maybe we should settle down here after all.” 

It was, of course, that precise moment at which a R.O.U.S. sailed through the air and collided with Quentin, knocking him to the ground. Hell, maybe the damned things understood English. And had a sense of irony. Quentin wrestled with the R.O.U.S., struggling under its weight, screaming when it sank its needle teeth into his shoulder. 

The sound of that scream went through Eliot like a magical current and suddenly he found himself utterly calm. He picked up a large stick and weighed it in his hands, finding it suitable. Then he swung it hard, connecting with the R.O.U.S.’s skull with a loud _crack_. It snarled at him, but did not disengage. So he hit it again, and again, and again, until finally it released Quentin and leapt at him.

Eliot began to raise the stick, when — _snap! pop!_ — a more elegant solution presented itself. It was barely a thought to fling the creature into the sudden spurt of flame. It shrieked something awful as it died. Eliot held it there in the grip of his mind until it was silent, smoking and smelling of burnt fur.

“Jesus,” said Quentin. He had scrambled to his feet and drawn his sword the moment he was able, and now he stood there, panting, his shoulder bare and bloody beneath his torn shirt. He was watching Eliot with wide eyes. “Thanks.”

Eliot cleared his throat. “Oh, don’t mention it,” he said, taking an airy tone. “I just don’t intend to let anything hurt you ever again, that’s all.” His hands were shaking a little.

Quentin took them gently in his. “Yeah,” he sighed. “The feeling’s mutual.” He brought Eliot’s hands to his mouth and kissed the knuckles of each in turn.

Eliot's eyes fluttered shut and he let out a long breath. Quentin was alive. He was alive. He was alive. He was _alive_. Eliot thought the words again and again, deliberately, a silent mantra.

“So.” Eliot opened his eyes to find Quentin giving him a small, hesitant smile. “You good to keep going?”

Eliot rolled his eyes fondly. “I’m not the one who just got bitten by a giant swamp rat," he said. "Oh, god, what if you have rabies? Do R.O.U.S.es carry rabies?”

“Hmm.” Quentin looked thoughtful. “You know, I’m not sure rabies exists in this universe.”

Eliot blinked, baffled. “What? Why wouldn’t rabies exist? It’s overall a largely realistic setting.”

“Realistic? Have you ever met a Rodent Of Unusual Size?”

“Q, we have seen _way_ weirder things than R.O.U.S.es. We fought a man made of moths. You bargained with a dragon. I used to know a guy who was in love with a sadistic talking sloth; are you seriously telling me that a giant rat potentially carrying rabies is too far-fetched for you?”

“Oh, come _on_ , El, what bearing do actual magical creatures from Earth or Fillory have on the fictional setting of an entirely separate-”

~

“Hey, guys?” Teddy interrupts. “Can you stop arguing about rabies? No offense, but it doesn’t seem important to the story.”

His fathers look at him, then at each other.

“Um,” says Dad. “Right, yeah. Sorry. Rabies is definitely not important to the story.”

“But I maintain that it _could_ be,” says Papa.

Dad rolls his eyes.

~

The journey through the Fire Swamp may have felt interminable but, all told, it wasn't long before they began to see sunlight seeping in through the trees. They clutched at each other’s hands and, though they were tired and winded, raced giddily toward the edge of the swamp. They broke free, finally, from the oppressive damp and darkness and rushed out into the sunlight-

And stopped.

Before them was a party of knights on horseback, dressed in Fillorian colors. At least four crossbows were aimed directly at Quentin’s heart, one of them in the hands of a woman he recognized as the princess herself. The gaze she leveled at him was as piercing as any bolt. “Surrender,” she said simply.

Well, shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> boy the bitterness just jumps back out unexpectedly sometimes doesn't it!!
> 
> i, uh. i don't know how they ended up bickering about rabies. it just happened? they do what they want, really, i just write it down.
> 
> turns out this chapter ends in a mean place too! and the next one might also. that’s plots for ya!


	6. The Castle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is about a thousand words longer than it’s supposed to be and that’s fine. it’s _fine_. it’s fine. 
> 
> also it varies SO wildly in tone. we love emotional whiplash in this house

"Are you offering?" asked the kidnapper.

Fen squinted, confused. "What?"

"You said 'surrender,'" he clarified. "I was just wondering if you were offering. To surrender. If so, I accept."

Fen couldn't say she particularly cared for his attitude of levity. She glared at him. "I _said_ -"

"Surrender," the kidnapper finished.

"Yes," she agreed, "exactly."

"No no, that time I was telling _you_ to surrender."

"Jesus," said Eliot, "which of you is Abbot and which is Costello?"

Fen ground her teeth. What kind of heartless villain kidnapped a man and then stood around joking about it with a crossbow leveled at his chest? "Eliot," she said, not shifting her gaze or her aim for a moment, "are you alright? Has he hurt you at all?"

"I'm fine," he answered. "Though I could probably use a change of clothes. I'm all full of sand."

Fen nodded. "If I find you have laid a finger on him," she told the kidnapper, "I will cut them all off one by one."

"I'm fine!" Eliot protested. "Really! Shipshape! Never been better! Really, though, the sand? _Everywhere_. I mean, just look at me. Seriously, Fen, _look at me_."

She did, finally tearing her eyes away from the kidnapper to look over her betrothed. He really was full of sand, not to mention bits and pieces of whatever else he had come across in the Fire Swamp. There were scratches all along his arms, and one across his cheek. And he was doing something... _weird_ , with his eyebrows. He was trying to tell her something, she was certain. She just had no idea what it was.

Recognizing her confusion, Eliot mouthed something at her and jerked his eyes sideways toward his kidnapper. What was he saying? It looked like a bunch of gibberish. Fen furrowed her brow and shrugged at him. He splayed his hands, then dropped them, frustrated.

Count Reynard’s oily voice piped up from beside her. “It’s no matter if he won’t surrender,” he said. “We can just kill him here and now. Any trial would be a formality, anyway.”

“Of course,” Fen agreed absently. A minute ago she would have argued with him, but now she was distracted. Her gaze was fixed on Eliot, who looked back at her with a plea in his eyes. What did he need her to do? If only she could _ask_ him.

“I guess you’d better kill me now, then,” the kidnapper said coldly, “because you will never hold me long enough for a trial, nor will you survive if you follow us back into the Fire Swamp. Come on, Eliot.” He tugged at Eliot’s hand, pulling him back toward the tree line. He hadn’t seen the knight hiding there in the shadows.

“Wait, Quentin-” Eliot stumbled a little. “Don’t _provoke_ them, they’re _armed_ -”

_Quentin?_

The knight in the trees took aim.

“Halt!” shouted Fen.

Everyone halted. The knights stared. Even Count Reynard looked distantly surprised; it wasn’t often she raised her voice. Fen ignored all of them and focused on the man beside Eliot. He was dressed all in black, caked with dirt and blood and sand, and wearing a mustache that put her in mind of a stiff bristled brush. But underneath it all she could see — the shaggy brown hair; the wide, warm eyes; the broad, work-worn hands. The man Eliot had described with such a gentle ache in his voice. His Quentin.

_Oh._

It took a moment for Fen to remember herself and stop staring. She cleared her throat and lowered her weapon, turning back to Count Reynard. “Forget the trial,” she said. “Let me deal with him myself.” She shot Quentin the most vicious glare she could muster, looking him over once more, then glanced at Eliot. He looked tentatively hopeful.

Count Reynard arched a brow. “You’re certain, Princess? I thought you were intent on justice.”

“This man...” she swallowed hard, tried to make herself steely. “This man kidnapped my fiancé. My wrath will be more just than any court. Leave him to me.” In the corner of her vision Eliot and Quentin had an urgent whispered exchange. Count Reynard looked pleased enough to make her stomach churn.

“Of course,” he agreed. “I never realized you were so vengeful, Your Highness. By all means, do what you like with him.” He motioned to the hidden knight, who came forward and pressed his crossbow into Quentin’s back.

Eliot, apparently freed from his kidnapper’s clutches, approached Fen and took her hand. “Thank you,” he said, eyes wide and earnest. He flitted a nervous glance at Reynard. “Thank you for helping me. I’ll be forever grateful.”

She beamed down at him from atop her horse. “Of course,” she told him. “No harm will come to you while I can help it.” _Either of you_ , she didn’t say, and hoped he would catch her meaning. He seemed to, smiling warmly as she helped him up onto her horse.

The knights took Quentin’s sword, tied his hands, and maneuvered him onto the back of one of their horses. Fen caught his eye. He nodded shortly at her.

“I suppose all’s well that ends well,” drawled Count Reynard as they began the arduous journey back to Whitespire. His tone was suspiciously pleasant.

But Eliot was seated behind her, hale and whole and happy, his arms secure around her waist, and just at the moment Fen could not be bothered with anything else. “Love wins,” he agreed. His hold on her tightened for a moment before relaxing. _Thank you._

Fen smiled. “It always does,” she said, patting his hand. _You’re welcome_. “There is no villain strong enough to stand in its way.” _Not even a tyrant king._

And with that decided, they made their way southwards.

~

“We’ve got a problem,” said Alice.

Julia looked up at her. She and Margo had been sitting here in this seedy tavern for the last twenty minutes or so, nursing bad ale so as not to look suspicious while Alice met with the proxy in the back. Julia had just been wondering whether avoiding scrutiny was really worth the sour taste when Alice finally reappeared, a frantic glint in her eyes, hands flexing at her sides as though working out a cramp. She hunched over the table now, speaking low, darting glances toward the door she had come from.

“Okay,” said Julia, noting Alice’s entirely conspicuous aura of tension. “Let’s maybe discuss it elsewhere?”

Alice nodded rapidly. “Yeah, uh, we should leave before anyone finds that guy unconscious and stuffed into a barrel. Not that he’ll be able to tell anyone who put him there; I patched his memory. But still.”

Margo leaned back in her chair, looking impressed. “Jesus, Alice, that’s vicious. You know, I really like your style sometimes.”

Alice blinked. “Oh. Thank you, Margo.” She seemed genuinely touched, which was understandable; Margo was the expert in all things vicious and she didn’t give praise lightly.

But now was not the time. “This is really sweet and all,” said Julia, “but maybe we can save the bonding moment for after we get out of here. And you explain why you knocked out the guy who was supposed to pay us.”

“Right!”

So here, as Alice told it minutes later, was the story: Eliot and the Man in Black had been captured by Ember’s knights. In the few days it had taken them to return to Fillory, the kidnapping had been sold as a plot by Lorian forces to weaken the crown, but with the prince returned to Whitespire there wasn’t enough cause to declare war. They had blown the job, and their employer wanted their heads on stakes.

And if Alice was right about their employer’s identity, he was perfectly capable of making that happen.

Julia looked west. Whitespire’s ivory peaks were just visible from the clearing where they stood, revolving lazily in the light of midday. Only the titular spires of the castle could be seen above the treetops, and for one sunlit moment Julia saw them as the great gleaming finger bones of a giant, cradling the heart of the kingdom in its grasp. Something cold settled in her chest. “I hope they’ll be alright,” she murmured. “I can’t believe they got caught.”

“I know.” Margo rolled her eye. “I mean, fuck’s sake. You ask a man to do _one_ thing.”

~

King Ember sipped his wine. Then, seeming to think better of that, he chugged the entire contents of the comically large goblet, holding one finger up to demand patience as he gulped noisily.

Eliot rolled his eyes. Fen glared.

Finally the king belched, sighed, dropped his empty cup on the floor with a clatter, and turned to address them. “Sorry, what was that? I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Your Majesty, we need to visit my father,” Fen repeated. “We must discuss the wedding with him.”

Ember looked nonplussed. “Whyever would you need to do that?”

“If he’s to give me away at the altar-”

“Give you away?” Ember’s puzzlement only grew. “But you’re not his possession to give. You’re _mine_.”

Uh-oh.

Eliot took Fen by the shoulders and tucked her under his arm before she could do something… impulsive. Like lunge at King Ember right in front of his advisors. He knew full well she kept knives in her skirts.

“What Princess Fen means to say,” he cut in hurriedly as she seethed and roiled in the crook of his elbow, “is that it’s _tradition_ for the father of the bride to walk her down the aisle, and we would _so_ appreciate if we were allowed to honor that.” He tried not to wince as Fen’s blunt fingernails dug into his forearm.

The king exchanged some quiet words with an advisor, then shrugged. “Fine. But the wedding’s not for months; why do you have to talk to him about it now? It’s always so dreadfully boring visiting him in that ugly little village.”

“We’ve — augh! — we’ve decided to move the wedding up!” Eliot rushed out, reaching wildly for a grip on the situation. He shot a pleading glance down at Fen, who apparently hadn’t realized she was beginning to draw blood. She eased up with an apologetic look. “Princess Fen here was just so _deeply_ distraught over my abduction-”

“Distraught,” Fen agreed helpfully. “Couldn’t bear it. I’ll kill that filthy pirate.”

“Yes. And after experiencing that, what it was like to fear for my life so-”

“I was _terrified_!”

“-she thought, you know, why wait? Why ever be parted again, if we can help it? So, uh-”

“So we wanted to move up the wedding! Absence makes the, the um-”

“Heart grow fonder, yes-”

“So I wanted to tell my father. In person. That we’ll need him to walk me down the aisle, in… a fort… nnn… ight?” She looked up at Eliot, eyes wide and inquiring.

“Yes, sure, a fortnight. Is what she said to me. Earlier.” They looked as one at King Ember, having reached the end of their little improv.

He was beaming. Thank god. “How utterly romantic,” he cooed. “You’ve never seemed so enthusiastic about the wedding before, what a pleasant surprise.”

Fen slid her grasp down Eliot’s forearm until she was holding his hand in hers. “I feared my true love was dead,” she said, in that deeply earnest manner she had, even as she lied through her teeth to a man she hated. “That changes a person. I have a new understanding of the situation now, and I will not allow foolish things to stand in the way of love any longer.” She squeezed his hand gently, a message just between them in the midst of all this outrageous lying and —

And. Oh. Well, why did she have to go and say all that. Now there were all these _feelings_ welling in his chest. Eliot cleared his throat roughly. “Exactly,” he said. “Nothing should stand in the way of love.”

Fen smiled angelically. Eliot was immensely grateful both to her and for her, and also a little irked that she was being so sweet when he was trying to keep his composure in front of the man who held their fate in his wine-sticky hands.

“Very well, then,” said Ember, who had retrieved his goblet from the floor and turned it upside down, trying to coax out whatever droplets might be left inside. “You may both take a day this week to go see your father. And your wedding will be held in one fortnight.” He paused in shaking the goblet to look around the room at his advisors. “Did you hear that? You have fourteen days to plan the wedding of the century. Chop chop!”

Suddenly the throne room was a flurry of motion, ringing with shouts from Ember about solid gold cake toppers and flocks of monogrammed doves. Eliot had no idea how you monogrammed a dove, and he really didn’t want to find out, so it was a relief when Fen took the chaos as an opportunity to drag him out the doors and down the hall and into a little nook hidden behind a tapestry.

“Well that wasn’t exactly how I was expecting that to go,” she said.

“I know,” Eliot sighed. “I’m sorry.” They hadn’t been planning to move up the wedding when they’d gone to see Ember. They’d only meant to request a visit with Fen’s father. “But we had to convince him and it was the first thing I thought of.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry. It worked!” Fen nudged him playfully. “Sounds like it’ll be some party, huh?”

“Mhmm. What a shame we won’t be around to see it.”

“A terrible shame,” Fen agreed. For a moment they simply looked at each other, solemn and straight-faced. Then, all at once, they broke into matching grins. “I’ll make the arrangements,” said Fen. “You pack our things.”

“But of course.” Eliot pulled aside the tapestry and gestured for her to pass through. “After you, Missus Eliot.”

“Why, thank you, Mister Fen.”

And they made their way down the castle corridor, arm in arm, delighted to think that this could very well be the last time they would ever do so. Before the week was out they would begin their lives anew.

~

Whitespire’s dungeon was oddly comfortable. Quentin’s cell had a little cot with a thin blanket, and a table and stool to eat at, and enough room to pace if he felt so inclined. The place was clean enough, and had solid walls that gave each prisoner suitable privacy. All in all, the accommodations were better than in some places he had stayed voluntarily.

None of this changed the fact that it was a dungeon.

Quentin had had his fill of pacing when he had first been captured, and in the ensuing few days had mostly resigned himself to waiting — though not particularly patiently. His cell had some sort of warding which prevented him from casting, but he could still study the movements of the guards through the little barred window of his door and do his best to strategize.

It wasn’t that he expected he’d have to escape on his own. _We’ll figure something out_ , Eliot had said, _me and Fen, I promise, we’ll figure something out and we’ll run away together, just like we always planned_ , his voice low and imploring, _just, please, go along with it,_ hand tight in his, _please or they’ll hurt you, Quentin, please-_

He had faith in Eliot; he always had, even when Eliot didn’t himself. And if Eliot said Fen was worthy of trust, Quentin would trust them both. But King Ember had a reputation for being impatient and unpredictable, for making cruel and careless decisions entirely on a whim, and Quentin couldn’t be certain that he would keep his head long enough to find out what _figuring something out_ entailed. So he did what he could to stay alert, and to distract himself from both the swell of reckless hope he felt for his and Eliot’s future, and the growing dread that he may not live to see it.

All in all, Quentin was having a hell of a week. It was all very up and down, emotionally. If only amusement park rides existed in this world so he would have something to compare it to.

On his fifth night in the cell, Quentin woke to the rattle of keys in the lock. He’d already been brought his evening meal, and as far as he knew he was not permitted to have visitors. He rose as silently as he could and tucked himself into the darkest corner of his cell, untouched by the pale shaft of moonlight from the tiny window.

Then a face appeared at the bars of his door. It was round and sweet, with incongruously keen eyes. Princess Fen.

“I hear you are called the Dread Pirate Roberts,” she said, her expression hard.

“By some,” he agreed, hesitantly stepping toward the light.

“That’s kind of a mouthful, though,” she went on. “I’ll just call you _prisoner_.”

The door swung open. Two guards entered swiftly, pinned him to the wall, and began to fix shackles to his hands and feet. “Seems a little rude,” he said, putting up a nominal struggle. “Not to use my name if you know it.”

The princess shrugged carelessly. “Maybe so, but I owe you no hospitality. And I don’t think ‘Roberts’ suits you, anyway.” Her harsh demeanor slipped for a moment, and Fen winked, cheesy and exaggerated.

Oh, of _course_ Eliot liked her.

“Guards,” she commanded once the shackles were secured, “leave the prisoner with me.”

They looked hesitant. “This man is very dangerous, Your Highness,” one of them said. “Wouldn’t you rather we stayed to ensure your safety?”

Princess Fen turned her chilly gaze on him. “Are you questioning me?” she snapped.

He stepped backward, seemingly on instinct. Quentin tried not to look amused. “No, no, Highness, only-”

“Good. I intend to take this prisoner into the forest, where I will hunt him for sport. Do either of you think you would be of more use abandoning your posts to follow me? Or do you trust that I am able to slay any man who wrongs me?” She stepped forward into the patch of moonlight, her cloak falling back from her shoulders with the movement. A stiletto glinted icily at her belt.

The guards left in somewhat of a hurry. They shut the door behind them, and then it was just the princess and the prisoner.

Just Fen and Quentin.

There was silence for a moment. Quentin cleared his throat. “Those guards seemed pretty terrified,” he said. “You must have quite a repu- oof!”

“Sorry!” Fen chirped, drawing back from the hug she had thrown herself into. “Sorry, Quentin, I know we don’t really know each other, but Eliot is just so happy to see you again and _I’m_ so happy to see _him_ happy so I’m _really_ happy to meet you and I kind of feel like I already- are you okay? You’re bleeding.”

Quentin blinked, sorting through the rapid-fire babble. “Yeah, uh, I’m alright.” He shifted his shoulder a little, wincing. “I think you just reopened my R.O.U.S. wound. It’s fine.”

Fen peeled the fabric back to look at it, wide-eyed. “I’ve never met anyone who’s survived a R.O.U.S. attack,” she said, awed.

Quentin shrugged his good shoulder. “I have Eliot to thank for it. So, um, you’re going to hunt me for sport?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Fen said with a grin. “I’ll chase you through the forest with my bow and my knives and feed your remains to the foxes. What a shame there won’t be anything left to bring back here but your shackles. Come on.” She tugged on the shackles, leading him out of the cell.

“O… kay,” he said, feeling he really ought to press a little just for the sake of clarity. “And when you say you’ll feed my remains to the foxes-”

“Silence, prisoner!” she barked, every inch the vengeful princess as she dragged him roughly through the dungeon. Then she looked back and winked again.

Well, alright.

~

Dove, one of the palace laundresses, happened to know that at least three noblemen were having affairs with the same woman and was delighted to talk about it to anyone who would listen, but she didn’t have any information that went beyond the simply sordid.

Tomas, who saw to the horses, had seen several visitors to the castle whom he suspected were members of the FU. No, of course he hadn’t ratted them out to anyone; he was only telling her because he knew she was sympathetic.

Adele, the head gardener, had overhead at least seven different shady dealings occurring on the palace grounds, but none of them had anything to do with the prince or princess.

Ethelind from the kitchens didn’t have any gossip for her today but would she like a pastry for the road, dear? (Yes, she would, thank you.)

And Carver of the palace guard said the princess had gone off the deep end and started hunting men for sport, but everyone knew not to listen to a damn thing Carver said anyway.

Margo was beginning to think she’d hit a dead end here. It looked like if she wanted information she was gonna have to go digging herself. So she pulled and twisted the cool moonlight into a cloak around her — a trick she had learned from Alice — and made her way unseen through the halls of the palace.

A few doors opened and closed, a few rooms slipped into, a few ledgers snooped in, a few eaves dropped. Someone was clearly embezzling funds. And there was some kind of escort service being run through the palace guard? Jeez, she’d thought Carver had made that up.

Margo was getting nowhere.

Until.

A good cloaking spell is, to all appearances, entirely undetectable. An imperfect casting may create a shimmer in the air, or flicker during motion, but a skilled magician can flawlessly hide themselves from the eyes of any man or beast for as long as they care to hold the spell. But any magician, no matter their skill, is fallible. And while they may hide themselves from sight, they all too often forget to account for the other senses.

Margo was approaching the dungeons when a woman strode forth from the entrance, cloak swishing, tugging a prisoner along behind her. The dim torchlight wasn’t enough to make out the details of their faces, but Margo didn’t need to see the prisoner’s face to identify him; she had never seen it to begin with. Luckily, she never forgot an outfit.

The woman pulled the Man in Black down the corridor with no small amount of force. Margo found herself torn between following them to see what happened and continuing in her investigation.

Then, a simple thing: a draft caught her hair.

The Man in Black and his captor were halfway down the hall already, too far for their movement to have stirred the air. Margo looked at the torches on the wall. Their flames stood straight up. There was no wind in the corridor. She inhaled, deeply, quietly. Lavender and aniseed. Someone else was here. Someone equally unseen.

_Well_ , she thought, if some other motherfucker in this castle was acting just as shady as she was, and they were hot on the Man in Black’s trail? That was as close to a lead as she was getting.

She followed at a distance as silently as she could.

~

Footsteps crunched on the leafy ground, heading straight for the clearing. Eliot’s heart jumped a little at the sound.

He should be more cautious, he knew, but he didn’t care. It could be just about anyone tromping around the forest late at night, as he was in a unique position to know. It could be bandits, or another team of freelance political kidnappers. But he had been waiting here for Fen and Quentin for what felt like ages, and he just _knew_ it was finally them.

The past four days had been agonizing, knowing that Quentin was so close by, living and breathing and smiling like the goddamn sunshine, and yet just barely out of reach. He was alive, he was _alive_ , and here Eliot had been pointedly ignoring that miracle to keep up appearances. Thank god everyone was already used to him shirking whatever royal duties he was appointed; he would never have been able to focus on any of them. The only thing he cared to think about was the breezy little island in his mind where they would make a new life. All three of them.

So maybe he had visited the map room and picked out a few places for consideration. So what.

They broke through the trees with a terrible racket of crunching and clanking. Quentin startled when Fen tugged at his chains, stumbling to a hasty stop. His gaze darted warily around the clearing before catching on Eliot, and Eliot watched his eyes widen slightly, his mouth turn up, the line of his shoulders relax. And there he was. His Q.

“Long time no see,” he said.

“Well, you know the royal life,” said Eliot. “Busy, busy, busy.”

Quentin made the same face he had always made back on the farm when Eliot would demand his help with obscenely simple tasks. The one that said, _you definitely don’t actually need me to carry this for you_. That said, _you’re not fooling anyone, El_. Said, _I know what you really mean and I feel the same, but god you’re ridiculous_. Fond and exasperated. Eliot could’ve cried.

Instead he gestured to Fen, who had drawn a stolen key from her belt and was busy unlocking the shackles. “How did she do?” he asked.

Quentin’s brow wrinkled.

“Eliot coached me,” Fen explained. “He gave me acting classes to make sure I could fool everyone into thinking I was really going to to kill you.” She grinned over at Eliot. “I think I really scared the guards!”

“Oh, definitely,” said Quentin. “Oscar worthy stuff. They were terrified.”

Fen slung the shackles over her shoulder and did a pleased little bounce. “Oh, I’m so glad! Usually I’m only good at scaring people I actually _want_ to hurt.”

Quentin tilted his head, looking bemused.

Eliot remembered feeling much the same early on in their acquaintance. “Fen, dearest, you truly do contain multitudes,” he said, patting her shoulder. And then he turned toward Quentin.

A smile spread slow and soft across his face. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

And then he reached down and Q reached up and their mouths met, gently, a little off center, and Eliot thought he’d be warm with it for decades. They’d done this a few days earlier, of course, when they’d been on the run in the wilderness, kissed and touched and held each other, but Eliot had been running on shock and adrenaline and sheer desperation and it had all felt a little surreal. Now he’d had time to think. To plan. Now they were here, together, in the still of the night, with a brand new future just waiting for the dawn to break.

Speaking of which, they should probably explain the plan to Quentin.

“We’re coming with you,” Eliot told him, a little breathless, getting somewhat ahead of himself.

Quentin just smiled easily up at him. “Okay. Where?”

“Anywhere,” said Fen, who had been waiting politely while they had their moment. Lovely girl. “As long as it’s far away from here. We’ll meet at the harbor at noon tomorrow; a friend of a friend of mine will be waiting there with a boat. He can take us to your ship, and then…”

“And then we’re free,” Eliot finished. “To go wherever we please. Although I do recall you promising me a tropical destination.”

“Ooh, the tropics!” Fen beamed. “I love warm weather.”

Quentin looked back and forth between the two of them, bemused again, and fond again, and nodded slowly. “Piracy was getting old anyway,” he said. “I think maybe I’d like to settle down. Have a family.”

And, _oh_ , Eliot needed to hold him right this second. So he did. He pulled Q and Fen both to his chest, and kissed their foreheads in turn, and the promise of their new life gleamed silver in the moonlight.

~

Their plans made and their future settled, Quentin watched until Eliot and Fen were fully out of sight between the trees before turning away from Whitespire. He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly.

This time tomorrow he would be sailing for home. Wherever that turned out to be. He let out a giddy little laugh at the idea of it. _Home_. It had been so long since he’d had one; since he’d had _Eliot_. It was all a little unbelievable.

But he would have forever to get used to it.

With that in mind, he began to make his way through the moonlit forest.

And then —

Everything stopped.

The chirping of crickets, the lazy rustle of the breeze through the branches, the wings of a bird suspended mid-flight. And Quentin’s legs beneath him. He struggled to move forward, to turn his head, even to fill his lungs, but it was all in vain. Time was still. It was as though the world had blinked and he was caught in its frozen afterimage.

“Quentin, was it?” A sanguine voice broke the sudden silence. “I’m so bad with names. But I believe that was what the wayward highnesses called you, yes?”

It was all Quentin could do to turn his gaze toward the source of the question. A man, average in height and build, leaned against a nearby tree. He wore fine clothes and a thin, vulpine smile. Count Reynard, Quentin remembered.

Reynard clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “So rude not to answer. Ah, but of course: you can’t.” His smile split into a grin, his canines just this side of unnaturally sharp. Quentin imagined for a moment that his teeth ought to be stained with blood. “Do you like it?” he asked, gesturing around them, indicating the all-encompassing stillness. “I stole this trick from some idiot witches who were fooling around with horomancy. Of course, they were never quite as good at it as I am.”

Quentin stared at him stonily, unable to do anything else.

“I know, I know,” sighed the count, apparently pleased with the sound of his own voice, “it must be such a disappointment to you that you won’t be escaping after all. It was a pretty plan the three of you had. The princess, the prince, and the pirate, sailing off into the sunset. I’m sure some would find it romantic. Our little royals are both so softhearted. And I know from hearts.” He had been slowly approaching as he spoke, and now he laid a mockingly amiable hand on Quentin’s shoulder. “Not suited at all for the throne. Good thing neither of them will live long enough to take it. Slain by Lorian assassins on their wedding night, I’m afraid. King Ember does _so_ want his war, you see.”

If Quentin’s breath had not been caught in his throat already, it would have become so then. He tried desperately to unstick his tongue, his fingers, to cast something, _anything_ , that would allow him to escape. To fight. To run and warn Eliot and Fen.

All he could do was stare into Reynard’s eyes. His putrid yellow eyes.

“They’ll be so very disappointed,” he continued, “when you don’t show tomorrow. Maybe even angry, or heartbroken. Ah, well. They should know better than to trust treacherous men.”

Yellow, yellow, _yellow_. The color of acid. The color of brimstone. Quentin wondered if Julia realized how close she was to her prize.

“But they won’t suffer long.” The count grinned his bloody grin. “Not like you will.” His hands closed around Quentin’s throat, clamping down on the thin stream of air he was already struggling to breathe, and it didn’t take very long at all for the darkness to swallow him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> man the endings of these chapters just keep getting meaner. we DO love emotional whiplash. but not as much as we love fen!!!
> 
> on which topic: if anyone has any notes on her characterization i would love to hear them. i, like, cannot go pick through canon for hints right now because canon and i are still not on speaking terms.
> 
> also. so like i have never once in my life claimed to have any grasp whatsoever on the concept of “schedules” or “regularity” so take this with a grain of salt. but updates will probably be somewhat slower now because at this point we’ve deviated significantly from the script, which means i have to actually, like, figure things out in advance instead of just following along with the movie. the plan was always to gradually spiral into a completely different version of events as the story went on but for some reason it took me this long to realize that would mean more work not just for quentin, but for me. huh!
> 
> anyway who wants to suggest some fillory-appropriate names for some bit part characters? one man & one woman. which makes them sound like a couple, but they’re not. in fact i’m deciding right now that they’re both gay. that’s not relevant to the story at all but it’s canon anyway


	7. The Harbor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally, a chapter that does not end in a mean place!! but the rest of it sort of makes up for that. sorry???
> 
> also sorry that it took so long to post. i did mention that i prefer to get the next chapter at least MOSTLY written before i post, and chapter eight is uh. hmm. difficult. and just fyi, nine will probably also be difficult, but for entirely different reasons. 
> 
> also, life. life is difficult

Margo fell to her hands and knees, gasping for air. “Son…” she croaked, “of a _twat_.”

The shady dickhead had dragged the Man in Black — had dragged _Quentin_ off somewhere she couldn’t see from the spot where she'd been frozen, and the spell had kept her rooted to the ground long after they’d disappeared. She had little hope of finding them now. God, she hated horomancy. 

At least she’d gotten some solid information. Her former employer, who was now planning to kill a half dozen people, one of them being Margo herself, was… well, was the aforementioned shady dickhead whose face she hadn’t seen. But now she knew for a fact he was working directly for King Ember. 

Things were looking exceptionally fucked. 

Margo pushed herself up off the ground, brushed off the clinging leaf litter, and cracked her neck. 

Someone was gonna have to unfuck them all. 

Someone was gonna have to be her. 

Dawn had just broken when she made it back to the little village in the forest. She ignored all manners and social graces and pounded on Julia’s door as though it had personally offended her. 

Julia answered after half a minute of furious rapping. Her clothes and hair were askew and she squinted blearily against the sunrise. “Margo? What’s wrong?" Some of the haze cleared from her eyes, replaced by alarm. "What happened at the castle last night?”

“Something bad enough that we shouldn’t go back there for a while.” Margo pushed her way inside and closed the door. “You had that chat with our FU buddies yet?”

“Um, no.” Julia shook her head, then looked disoriented by the motion. “We’re supposed to meet this afternoon.”

“Good. I got a message for them to deliver.”

~

The harbor was a bright and bustling place, alive with cheer and chatter, smelling of all manner of things pulled from the sea. It reminded Fen of life before Whitespire, bartering at the village market or laughing in the square with her friends. But this was not life-before-Whitespire. It was life- _after_ -Whitespire. Life-after-Fillory, even. She felt a pang at that, at leaving the only home she had ever known in the hands of King Ember. But he had ruled the land since before she was born, and he would rule it when she was gone, and in this new chapter of her life she would come to know another home just as well as this one.

“This place smells awful,” said Eliot.

Fen smiled up at him, wrinkling her nose cheerily. “I know. Isn’t it wonderful?”

He laughed and took her hand and let her lead him to where their boat was docked. They made idle conversation with her friend-of-a-friend (Bjorn, as he introduced himself with a smile and a hearty handshake) while they waited. And waited. 

And waited.

The sun began to descend from its apogee and still they waited.

Tension pulled at Eliot’s brow and at his mouth, and still they waited.

Fen’s stomach curdled with anxiety. Still they waited.

Quentin didn't show. 

Midday turned to afternoon. Ships and dinghies and passengers came and went. Fen and Eliot remained, standing still among the clamoring crowd. Which one of them, she wondered, would be the first to say it? Would she be the one to admit to what they both knew, or would Eliot?

In the end it was Bjorn who spoke first. “Are you sure your friend means to meet us today?” he asked carefully, scratching at his beard. “Maybe he misunderstood, thought another day-”

“No,” said Eliot. “No, if he’s not coming it’s. It’s because something happened. Something bad.”

Fen took his hand again. “Eliot, maybe…” she began, and found she didn’t know how to end.

“Something happened to him, Fen,” he said, low and insistent, his eyes fixing on hers. “He wouldn’t just- he’d _never_. He wouldn’t leave us here. Something is _wrong_.”

“Okay,” she replied gently. “I know. I believe you.”

Bjorn looked sympathetic. “Listen, I don’t have anywhere to be for the rest of the day,” he said. “We can wait here as long as you like.”

“They’re expecting us back at Whitespire by nightfall,” Fen said. “We were only supposed to spend the day with my father.”

“You’re going back to the castle?” asked Bjorn. “I can still take the two of you wherever you want to go. You don’t have to stay here.”

Eliot shook his head grimly, his hand tight in hers. “I’m not leaving without Quentin. I can’t.”

“And I can’t…” Fen trailed off. What use was there in continuing? _I can’t_. That was the plain truth of it. Some part of her had known, or should have known, all along. “God, I can’t leave at all,” she sighed. “I know my responsibilities. I shouldn’t be trying to abandon them like this.”

Eliot frowned. “Fen, you’re not abandoning anything.”

“But I _am_ ,” she argued. “I got so caught up in the dream of running away from my problems and sailing off into the sunset with you that I forgot my duty to Fillory. To my people. _Our_ people.” She drew in a shaky breath. “I see now that was selfish. Fillory deserves a just ruler. And I never wanted to be it, but that doesn’t matter. I’m what we’ve got.”

“Fen.” Eliot took her other hand as well, turning her to face him. “All of Fillory is not your responsibility.”

“Then whose is it?” She gave Eliot a small, sad smile, knowing as well as he did that he didn’t have an answer. “I’ll still help you find Quentin again. I told you I wouldn’t let any harm come to either of you, and I meant it. And when the time comes I’ll help you leave together. But I belong here.”

Eliot swallowed hard. “The minute Ember’s reign is over I’ll come back to visit,” he promised. “Every single holiday, even the dumb ones no one cares about. We’ll have an Arbor Day party every year.” He squeezed her hands before dropping them and turning away. “Bjorn, you said you’re free for the day? Would you mind terribly waiting here without us? Just in case.”

Bjorn shrugged. “I don't see why not. What should I do if your friend shows up?”

“Take him where he leads you,” said Eliot. “And send word as soon as you can. We’ll find our way to each other one way or another.”

Bjorn nodded. And with that, they left. 

The pair of them made their way through the crowds arm in arm, hearts heavy as crowns. A new sense of determination settled over Fen and, looking up at Eliot, she knew he felt it too. Their duties were separate but alike in weight: to protect what they each loved most. 

“You know, Fen,” Eliot said, breaking their silence. A tired sigh was laced through his tone but it was warm nonetheless. “I think you’re one of the best people I know. And I do love you. I haven’t said that enough, have I.”

Fen considered this, laying her head against his shoulder for a moment as they walked. “Maybe not,” she said. “But you’ve never really needed to say it.”

Life among the nobility had taught Fen that words were slippery, silvery things. Far too easily manipulated. She herself had always been the sort to say exactly what she meant, but even that counted for little when the time came to act. 

And the time had come.

~

Quentin woke slowly, sighing. The air was cool and damp and smelled of earth. The surface beneath him was far harder than his cot should’ve been. He tried to stretch his arms, but found they were pinned above his head and secured at the wrists. 

Oh. 

Shit. 

Quentin opened his eyes, sluggishness leaving him all at once. The room he found himself in seemed to be constructed largely of packed dirt, like some sort of den. He was lying on a wooden table in the center of it, his hands and feet chained. And in the corner of the room, sitting at a desk, his back to Quentin, was Count Reynard. 

“Oh, good,” he said, looking up at the sound of movement. “You’re awake. I was this close to starting without you.” He rose and approached the table, his smile all the more unnerving for its apparent sincerity. “We’re going to have _so_ much fun.”

Quentin flexed his wrists against the chains and glared. “I think we might have different ideas of what fun is.”

Reynard laughed. “Oh, I knew you’d be one of the _brave_ ones. That won’t last long.” He began to withdraw a series of items from somewhere Quentin couldn’t see — beneath the table, maybe. A large chunk of clear crystal. Several crooked tallow candles. A small bowl of something thick and foul that resembled reddish molasses. Reynard dipped his fingers into it with the air of someone well accustomed to getting his hands dirty. “You’ll break.”

“I don’t know,” said Quentin, trying not to wince at the rancid smell of the ooze, or the way it burned when Reynard smeared thick lines of it in ugly shapes across his face and chest. “I’ve been broken before. It never really seems to stick.”

Count Reynard smiled again and began setting up the candles around him, summoning a flame in his palm to melt the bottoms so they would stand. “Oh, keep up the optimism,” he said. “Really. For as long as you can. It’s so much better that way.” He paused in his task to meet Quentin’s eyes. He wore the sort of expression you might expect from someone making pleasant conversation with a friend over a meal. His yellow eyes said that if this was a meal, Quentin ought to have an apple in his mouth. “You know, I usually don’t bother with men,” he said. “They’re just not as _fun_. Normally I’d just rip your heart out and be done with it.” He set the crystal on Quentin’s chest, just over his heart. “But you’ve caused me a lot of trouble, Quentin. So I’m going to try to enjoy this.”

“Any chance ‘this’ is some kind of spa treatment?”

Reynard's brow arched over his acid eyes. “ _This_ ," he said, "is a spell I’ve been working on for… oh, nearly half my life. I’ve devised a new version, and you’ll be the very first to test it. So do be honest with your feedback.” He began to draw odd, angular patterns with his hands, his fingers bending into painful shapes, chanting something low and rhythmic under his breath. 

Nausea sparked in Quentin’s stomach, and then a wave of dread rolled through him, and then — and then the sensation of something moving, twisting, writhing inside of his bones, tearing through the marrow, cracking, shattering the shells of them, climbing upward through flesh and muscle, crawling in his guts ripping through viscera ruining his insides carving tunneling rushing wretchedly through him shrieking in his skull in his ribs in his toes all pulsing centered on the heavy sick thud of his heart —

And Quentin screamed.

~

“You alright, pumpkin?” asks Papa. 

Teddy blinks, realizing he’s curled up tight under Papa’s arm, hugging his knees to his chest. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m fine. I just don’t like this part.”

Papa kisses the top of his head. “Hmm. Me neither.”

“I can stop, if you want,” offers Dad, his forehead crinkling up with concern. “There are plenty of other stories I could tell you. Like, oh, there’s the one about the man who falls in love with a star, or-”

“No, it’s okay,” insists Teddy. “I want to hear this one.” 

“Are you sure? I don’t want to upset you.”

Teddy nods and wiggles in place until he’s upright. He gives Dad his very best _I’m a grown up and I can handle it_ face. “I like the people in it,” he says. “And you said… you said it gets worse before it gets better, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I wanna see it get better,” says Teddy. “For all of them.”

Papa combs gentle fingers through his hair. “You know, I think I’d like to see that too.”

“Alright,” says Dad. “As you wish.”

~

“So,” said Count Reynard, once Quentin could hear again over the blood rushing in his head and the sound of his own sharp gasps, “how was that?”

Quentin let out a groan.

“Remember, I want total honesty. You can cry if you need to.”

It was a concentrated effort to unclench his jaw. “Fuck you,” he spat hoarsely.

“Hmm. Interesting.” Reynard removed the stone from his chest and held it up to the torchlight. “Do you see that?” he asked.

Quentin looked at the crystal. There, in the heart of it, was a thin but vivid wisp of crimson. It had been entirely colorless before, he was certain.

“Do you know what that is?”

“I get the feeling you’re gonna tell me,” he croaked.

“That’s your life.”

Quentin didn’t have the energy to look incredulous. Instead he just stared flatly.

“Really, it is,” said Reynard. “About a year of it, give or take. The spell drew it right out of you.”

Quentin wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of his curiosity. The motherfucker would keep talking whether he encouraged him or not, anyway. He closed his eyes and willed his head to stop pounding.

“Someday,” Reynard continued, “I’ll find a way not just to capture life, but to harness it. To use it as energy. The things I do now will look like party tricks, then. I’ll be unstoppable. I’ll be a _god_.”

Oh, great. Like they needed any worse gods than the ones they already had.

That was Quentin's last thought before darkness took him again.

~

“Well, shit,” said Alice. 

“Yup.” Margo leaned back in her chair, ankles crossed on the table. Julia stared at her feet pointedly, but Margo didn’t appear to notice. 

“You seem… calm, about all this,” Alice observed. 

“Uh-huh. That’s cause we’re gonna fix it.”

“Fix it.”

“Yup.”

“How?”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s why I got the crew together, so we can come up with a plan. Fucking contribute, would you?”

Alice blinked. “Okay, um. Okay. The nobleman-”

“Shady Dickhead,” Margo corrected. 

“Shady Dickhead. He said Eliot and the princess will die on their wedding night?”

“Slain by imaginary Lorian assassins.”

“Well, that’s not for months. So clearly, the, um, Man in Black-”

“Quentin.”

“Quentin is in more immediate danger.”

“Exactly what we were thinking,” said Julia. “So we should focus on him.”

“Specifically, on figuring out where the fuck Shady Dickhead dragged him off to.”

“We could try following him around for a few days, maybe?”

“Hold on,” said Alice. “Has it occurred to either of you that maybe we should focus on _ourselves_? This nobleman-” Margo opened her mouth- “ _Shady Dickhead_ wants to kill us, and we’re sitting here talking about going after him. Shouldn’t we consider lying low for a while?”

Julia and Margo stared at her blankly. 

“Right,” Alice sighed. “Of course not.” God forbid they ever just sit one out for safety. Go do something normal for once. “The fact remains that we don’t have a way to find Quentin. If we follow Shady Dickhead long enough to track his movements we risk being spotted, and not even I can keep up a cloaking spell for that long. Ideally we’d cast a tracking spell on Quentin, but there’s always the possibility he’s warded, and anyway we don’t have anything of his to use.”

“Actually,” said Julia, “that might not be _entirely_ true.” She pulled her shirt aside to reveal the bandages on her shoulder. “We drew blood from each other,” she said. “There’s power in that.”

“You’re thinking a blood-calls-to-blood type deal?” asked Margo.

“A variation. I’m sure I could rig something up.”

“Blood magic is tricky,” Alice said, pointing out the obvious, because apparently that job fell to her. “It’s more… _animal_ than what any of us usually work with. It tends to have a mind of its own.”

“Which is why it can pierce wards,” Julia reasoned. 

“Right, but it’s unpredictable. It has unexpected side effects, or it demands some kind of cost.”

“Then it's a good thing we’ve got three top notch magicians to keep it in check,” said Margo. 

And that seemed to be that.

~

Four days. 

It had been four days since Quentin hadn’t shown at the harbor, and Eliot was no closer to finding him. 

There just wasn’t a whole lot he could _do_. Since his return Ember had been steadily increasing palace security. Guards were posted at every entrance, there were routine patrols at the edge of the forest, and someone was always following Eliot around, ducking ineffectually behind tapestries or potted plants when he turned around. The worst offender was a foot servant by the name of Todd, who not only was a terrible hider, but would actually argue that he wasn’t there when Eliot caught him at it. 

One morning Eliot had opened his wardrobe to find Todd sitting inside, wearing one of Eliot’s doublets and a frightened-baby-deer expression. Eliot had simply shut the wardrobe and resigned himself to pajamas for the next few hours. 

He’d been spending most of his time in his chambers, anyway, holed up with whatever books the royal library had to offer on quaeromancy. Ember had roundly forbidden him from leaving the castle, and Fen as well, and neither of them had figured out a way to evade the guards yet. Fen was becoming vicious under the stringent new rules, like a cat confined to a carrier, hissing and spitting and scratching when anyone but Eliot came near. Eliot, for his part, was too tired to be angry. He was beginning to despair. 

Quaeromancy was all well and good, but no matter how he tried Eliot just didn’t seem to have the knack for finding lost things. There were forms of it adapted to be more universal, but those mainly consisted of tracking spells, and Eliot found himself equally out of luck on that front. You couldn’t build a reliable tracking spell from nothing. You needed something of the person you hoped to find: a lock of hair, a gift they’d given, something that belonged to them. 

Eliot wondered idly, and a little morbidly, if his heart would work. 

Failing that, he had nothing. 

Every once in a while, Fen dragged him out of his room, insisting he take a break from his searching. He wasn’t sure if this was more out of concern for him or a desire for tolerable company, but either way he’d learned to go along with it. Today she had led him to the gardens, which was the farthest they were allowed to stray outside the castle. They curled up in their favorite spot, behind the same stand of flowering bushes where Fen had asked him what it was like to be in love. 

She didn’t ask him anything now. Just leaned against his shoulder and found shapes in the clouds. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he told her. “That’s _clearly_ a porcupine.”

“No, I’m telling you it’s Ethelind from the kitchens! See, that’s her hair, and there’s the tray she’s holding, and she’s bending to put it in the oven.”

“I didn’t know Whitespire employed porcupines,” said Eliot. “That’s good of them.”

Fen wrinkled her nose at him, but her rebuttal was cut off by a strange woman stumbling through a rhododendron bush, scattering purple petals everywhere. “Fen!” she cried, then spit out a leaf. “I thought I heard your voice. What luck! It was nearly impossible to get in here, I can’t imagine trying to get into the castle itself.”

“Myrna,” said Fen. “What are you doing here? This place is crawling with guards; it’s not safe.”

Myrna looked grave. “I know. It’s not safe for you either. I come with a warning that I could not risk putting to paper.” She knelt down to speak in a hushed tone. “Prince Eliot’s abduction was no coincidence. It was planned by Ember himself, with the intention of starting a war with Loria. Now that his plan has been foiled, he means to have you both killed on your wedding night, and Loria blamed for it.”

Eliot blinked. This was… a lot to process, all at once. “Okay,” he said. “Hi, Myrna. I’m Eliot. Nice to meet you.” He held out a hand, which she shook firmly. “Wonderful. Now, what the fuck is going on?”

“Myrna is a friend of mine from Fillorians United,” explained Fen. “I trust any information she brings us.”

Myrna nodded sharply. “It is of utmost importance that you make your move before the wedding night.”

“Our… move?” Eliot looked between the two women for an explanation. 

Fen made at least seven different uncomfortable faces in rapid succession. None of them were particularly illuminating. 

Myrna frowned. “Does he not know?”

“I didn’t want to incriminate him.”

“That’s hardly a concern now.”

“I know, but-”

“For fuck’s sake,” said Eliot, “someone tell me what’s happening.”

Fen chewed her lip. “Remember when I told you I used to be a FU fighter?”

“Of course.”

Fen and Myrna looked at each other, then back at him. Fen shrugged, turning her palms upward. “Well…”

“Oh, for- you never left the FU, did you.”

“Not… as such.”

“Why didn’t you just _tell_ me that? I mean, Jesus, what did you think? That I would turn you in?”

Fen’s eyes went round. “No, of course not! I trust you, Eliot. I was just trying to protect you.” She took his hands in hers. “Please don’t hate me. I don’t want to keep secrets from you, I just thought you would be safer if you didn’t know.”

Eliot sighed. “Well of course I don’t _hate_ you. But I’m not happy, either.” Fen looked down, pulling her hands away to twist them into her skirt. “It doesn't matter. We have bigger problems right now. Myrna, what were you saying about making our move?”

“The king plans to have you killed on your wedding night,” Myrna said. “And with the extra security, we won’t be able to get enough of our people inside the palace until-”

“The wedding,” said Fen with a sharp nod. “When the doors will be open to all the people of Fillory.”

“Exactly.”

Eliot looked between them again, taking in their set jaws, their squared shoulders. The brightness of trepidation in Fen’s eyes. Her determination nonetheless. “Is this what I think it is?”

“It is,” Fen confirmed. “Eliot. We’re staging a coup.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the real happy ending is overthrowing the oppressive government


	8. The Pit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the pit..... i fell in the pit...... you fell in the pit....... we all fell in the piiiieeeiiiiiiit......
> 
> anyway. 
> 
> i should warn you that things get rough here for a minute. if you’ve seen the princess bride, which i have to assume you have, you can imagine what’s about to happen. you’ll also know that it’s going to turn out okay, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be hard to read. i mean, possibly, anyway. i don’t know how you’ll feel. i know it was hard for me to write. 
> 
> this chapter ends on a hopeful note, because i’m not the kind of writer who’s gonna make you slog through a bunch of angst without any break til the next update. but if you would prefer, you can probably skip the quentin scenes and still follow along just fine. do what you gotta

The pages of the book creased and tore under Eliot’s hands. He took a deep breath and forced himself to relax his fingers from the tense, angry claws they kept curling into. He had to stay calm. He had to get his shit together. At the very least, he had to get his own goddamn hands under control, or he’d never get this casting right. 

He set the book down on the table. 

_I have more to tell_ , Myrna had said, once they had discussed the coup in great and elaborate detail, none of which Eliot could be bothered to recall right now, and all of which had taken entirely too fucking long for his taste. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Fillory and Fen and overthrowing the tyrannical monarch who held the land and its people under his dirty thumb et cetera et cetera. But all the minutes spent discussing that amounted to time that he hadn’t been doing anything to help Quentin. 

Because the second part of Myrna’s message had been thus: Quentin was in mortal danger. Apparently, Eliot and Fen hadn’t been gone from the clearing two minutes when an unnamed nobleman had dropped his cloaking spell, revealed that he had been following them the whole time, neatly incapacitated Quentin, and dragged him off to god-knew-fucking-where-but-definitely-nowhere-good. Myrna had given a description of the man, but Fen and Eliot were already exchanging grim glances before she even began. Neither of them needed to hear about his height or his hair color to know that if Ember had enlisted anyone to do the dirty work of disposing of pesky interferences it was certainly Count Reynard.

So, Quentin was in the clutches of literally the creepiest bastard in all of Fillory and perhaps the world, and no one knew where he was. Except for said creepy bastard. 

Good thing Eliot had been reading up on tracking spells. 

So he couldn’t track Quentin. Fine. He would track Reynard, then, and trace his steps right into whatever tacky, unoriginal evil lair he was keeping Quentin prisoner in, and he would save Quentin, and they would be together again, and then most likely Quentin would have to talk him down from murder. 

Eliot was very carefully not thinking of any other possible outcomes. 

He breathed deeply to still his nerves and smoothed out the pages of the book. He withdrew from his pocket the glove he had stolen off Reynard for just this purpose. And he began to weave the spell that would lead him to Quentin. 

~

Quentin drifted in and out of consciousness. He couldn’t possibly have guessed at how long he had been here, nor at how many hours he lost between bouts of wakefulness. He woke. He tried to escape. He failed. Reynard arrived. The spell was cast. He screamed. He sobbed. He slept.

He felt his life seep from his body, slowly, agonizingly, in thin unsteady trickles. Reynard seemed to want him alive for a good while yet. If the count’s sadism was the only thing keeping his heart beating, he supposed he would have to find a way to be grateful for it. 

He thought of Julia sometimes. He wondered if Reynard had cast an earlier version of his spell on her, if she had seen her life in crimson crystal, if she had suffered more bravely than he did now. If she would ever get her revenge.

He thought of Eliot often. He hoped that he and Fen would learn of the king’s plans and escape in time. That they would be happy together, on that tropical island they had spoken of. That Eliot would find a way to forgive him for not coming back this time. 

Mostly he didn’t think at all. 

At some unknown hour, on some unknown day, he was awakened by a jolt of pain. For a moment he thought Reynard had arrived and begun the spell while he slept, but the torches were unlit, and this pain was new. It felt… brighter, somehow? Sharper? Almost pleasant, in comparison to Reynard's torture. The strange pain burned in a straight line slashed across his outer thigh. It was, he realized, where Julia had wounded him, however long ago it had been now. 

Quentin tilted his head as much as he could manage and saw that the wound was glowing, just faintly. It wouldn’t have been visible were he not in darkness. The glow spread suddenly, overtaking his body rapidly like a flame to kerosene. Everywhere the light touched he felt strange and sensitized, like the new skin beneath a fingernail cut too far down, like he was being touched in the untouchable parts of him, known in ways unknowable, a strange, seeking presence settling, buzzing, between his veins and sinews. He gasped, overwhelmed by the impossible sensation. And then, just as suddenly, it was gone. 

“El?” he mumbled, delirious and confused. "No… Julia?"

No answer was spoken. 

But he thought, perhaps, he felt one. 

And then he slept. 

~

Julia opened her eyes to find they were filled with tears. She blinked rapidly, feeling them spill in hot streams down her cheeks. It had been so long since she’d last cried. 

“Julia? Are you okay?” Alice was standing to her left, hands still set in the final position of the spell they had spent the last few days writing. She was clearly alarmed at Julia’s reaction, her blue eyes wide with worry. Julia turned to her right to find Margo looking similarly concerned, brows pulled together, feet planted wide in the dirt as if she was ready to fight whatever had caused Julia distress. 

“I’m alright,” she assured them both. “Just… there was so much pain. It felt like dying.”

Alice’s mouth puckered. “I _told_ you blood magic is unpredictable. We have no idea what it might have done to you-”

“It wasn’t the spell,” said Julia. “It wasn’t _my_ pain. It was his.” She hesitated, clutching tightly at the pommel of her sword — as the instrument with which she had drawn Quentin’s blood, it was a vital component of the spell. “But it felt… familiar, somehow.”

Alice and Margo exchanged a worried glance across the sigil they had drawn with sticks in the soft earth. “Familiar how?” asked Margo. 

“I don’t… It made me think of- I don’t know.” Julia broke off, finding herself at a loss. “It doesn’t make any sense. I think he’s been in the worst pain he’s ever felt, so maybe that translated into reminding me of the worst pain _I’ve_ ever felt.” She swallowed hard and did not think of yellow eyes. That wasn’t her mission right now. “What matters is that the spell worked.” She raised her sword before her, both hands on the hilt, blade pointed toward the heavens, and felt the magnetic pull of the spell. “I can feel him. Which means I can find him.”

~

“Your sweetheart the prince thinks himself very clever.”

Quentin’s eyelids felt like they’d been stitched out of sandpaper and filled with lead. He dragged them open anyway. 

Reynard was smiling down at him pleasantly. It was the kind of pleasantness that would’ve inspired dread in someone who had the capacity for it. Quentin himself was fresh out. “He isn’t _nearly_ as smart as he believes,” Reynard continued. 

_I guess you have something in common_ , Quentin tried to say, but the words caught like pins in the soft flesh of his raw throat. “I gh,” he tried again. “Guess you- _hkk_ -” and he coughed blood onto the table. 

“Oh, it’s alright,” Reynard assured him, still smiling implacably. “I’m sure whatever snappy remark you’re trying to make would have been _devastating_. But I’m not here to chat.”

Quentin shut his eyes and waited for Reynard to prepare the spell. He was so tired. He was so _tired_. 

“Well, you don’t have to clam up entirely,” Reynard said as the familiar weight of a clear crystal settled on Quentin’s chest. “You should at least say goodbye.”

Quentin’s eyes snapped open. Reynard was busily lighting the candles. “Good… bye?”

“Well, how polite. Goodbye to you too, Quentin.” Reynard began painting on the evil-smelling ooze. Quentin barely gagged at the scent anymore. “See, your not-so-clever beau has done something even more stupid than I would’ve given him credit for. He’s trying to _save_ you from me.”

Oh, Eliot. Of _course_ he was. Of course he hadn’t given up; of course he would come for Quentin. And it would be too late. Quentin closed his eyes and rolled his head to face the wall. Reynard wouldn’t see his tears. 

“The little fucker stole one of my gloves, probably thinking I wouldn’t notice. Thinking I wouldn’t notice him taking every book on quaeromancy out of the royal library, either. Someone should teach him how to cover his tracks.”

Quentin suspected he really couldn’t afford to lose any fluids. He squeezed his eyes shut tighter. 

“Oh, don’t worry about _him_ ,” said Reynard. “Ember’s plans haven’t changed. He’ll make it to his wedding night. You, on the other hand…” he clucked his tongue. “If Prince Idiot intends to come looking for you, fine. I’ll give him something to find. I’ve never tried to drain someone’s life all at once before; It’ll be an interesting experiment.” There were the sounds of him wiping the muck from his hands, placing the bowl back under the table. “I’d ask if you have any last words but, well. We both know you’d only ruin them by screaming afterwards.”

“Hhgh… h- how ‘bout: go to hell,” Quentin wheezed, glaring as fiercely as he could manage. It amounted to little. 

Reynard shrugged. “That’s about what I expected from you,” he said. And he smiled again.

Sick. He was sick. This was all so fucking sick, and Quentin felt his stomach turn, thinking of Eliot coming here, finding his body. Losing him again in such a horrible way. More than anything else, Quentin couldn’t bear that. The pain and the horror and the brevity of his life — all were miserable prices to pay, but they would soon be over. But Eliot… 

Reynard began to chant. The pain came, a tidal wave of agony that rushed up and crashed over his head. 

_I’ll come back to you_ , Quentin had promised, once, twice, a dozen times, perhaps a thousand — he’d promised it with his words, and with his hands and his mouth and his heart. _I will always come back to you_. It was meaningless now, but he thought it again and again, through the pain, desperately, a vow he could not fulfill but would die swearing. _I will always come back to you, I will always come back to you, I will always come back to you, I will always, always, always come back-_

~

The Leo Blade guided them true. 

Of course it did. It had never done any less than Julia had asked of it. 

Julia led them through the forest, sure-footed and shut-eyed, following the call of the blood her blade had last tasted. She didn’t need to see when she could _feel_. It wasn’t a pleasant sort of feeling, mind you, it was roiling and nauseous and painful and it set her teeth, along with the rest of her, on a knife’s edge. But it was growing stronger. With every sickening jump in her pulse, every twist of her stomach, Julia knew the spell was working. 

They broke into a clearing ringed with gnarled, knotted trees. Julia could feel that they were close — more than close, they were _there_ , Quentin was _here_ , near enough to touch, almost, her veins humming with it. 

And then she felt — she — _oh_ — 

Emptiness. Slow, torturous emptiness. Like everything inside her was being — _Goddess!_ — was being wrenched out of her without even the kindness of cutting her open first. Like there was so little of her left, and now it was being stolen. Torn from inside her bones and pulled out of her body through her skin. It was agonizing. And it was _familiar_. She hadn’t felt this before, no, not exactly, but. But she had felt something very like it. 

It pulled her down, drowned her in its depths. Her own body, her surroundings, felt muted and distant. She struggled to reach them. The ground beneath her. The rapid thud of her heart. Hands touching her, gently, frantically, searching her body for the source of a pain that was not hers. Screaming. Her own. And someone else’s, muffled. 

“Julia? Julia, breathe! Can you hear me?” Alice. That was Alice’s voice, above her, her perpetually chilly hands gripping Julia’s shoulders. 

Julia opened her eyes, struggling for breath. It came to her in great heaving gasps that could not seem to fill her lungs. Margo stood before her, holding her sword. The blade was dirty. She must have dropped it when she had fallen. Margo was scanning the trees, ready for any threats that might appear, drawn by the sound of a woman screaming, while Julia was incapacitated. 

Alice knelt behind her, supporting her head and shoulders. Julia tilted her head back to look up at her. “Dying,” she croaked. “He’s dying. It’s him, it’s _him_ , he’s- he’s killing him-”

“Who?” Alice’s brows drew even closer together than they already had. “Who’s killing him?”

“The- fuck.” Julia’s muscles spasmed, her throat closing, her limbs drawing up against her. “The man- the _yellow-_ ” she gasped and choked, fighting to speak. “It’s _him_.”

“I’m calling this off,” said Margo’s voice from above them. Julia looked up at her. She was still holding the sword, ready for a fight, but her eyes were on Julia. “This is fucked up. We have to break the connection.”

Julia let out a high, hysterical sound that wasn’t quite laughter. “Funny story,” she said. “Hadn’t fig- _aagh!_ Figured. That one out, yet.” She curled in on herself, shuddering. 

“Well, shit,” said Margo. 

“We have to do _something_ ,” said Alice. “This is killing you!”

Julia shook her head. “No. It’s… killing _him_. I’m just. Feeling it.”

Alice’s fingers dug into her shoulders. There was a moment of quiet, and Julia knew her companions were speaking without words. “We can still sever the connection,” Alice said. “I’m sure if we all-”

“No.”

“No?”

“ _No_ ,” Julia repeated. She was so close. So close to what she had been chasing all this time. He wouldn’t slip away from her again; he wouldn’t kill another innocent. If she had to endure this torture again to find him, so be it. “I can do this,” she said. “I can do it.”

And then, suddenly, it was over. The agony stopped. There was no pain but the dull throb of the wound in her shoulder. She felt — emptiness, again, but not painful this time. Quiet. Final. Her head swam with darkness, but she pushed back against it. 

“Oh, motherfuck,” Margo said, from somewhere far away — though, oddly, she looked closer than she had been before. 

A tree moved. It moved? That couldn’t be right. The trunk… opened?

Julia felt one of Alice’s cloaking spells settle around them as a man emerged from within the tree. _Yellow_ , she thought. 

And then she thought nothing at all. 

~

“Bullshit,” says Teddy. 

“What is?” asks Dad, who’s apparently given up on minding Teddy’s language. At least for today. He’ll be back to scolding him tomorrow, probably.

“You’re telling me that Westley’s dead? Bullshit.”

“Uh,” says Dad. “Well I think you can infer for yourself, from the story-”

“I can infer that you’re full of bullshit.”

Dad rolls his eyes. “Okay, come on now.”

Papa coughs loudly, poorly disguising his laughter. 

“You already said he was dead once, and then he came back! He’s gonna come back again; they’re gonna bring him back. Otherwise what’s the point of the story.”

“The point?”

“Yeah. ‘Cause a story gets told for a reason; you taught me that. It’s a journey, and the journey isn’t over yet. If the ending is that he dies and no one learns anything and nothing changes and they all just go back to what they were doing before, then there’s no reason. There has to be a reason.”

“Oh, there _does_ , hmm?” Papa is egging him on now. 

“Yeah! You said the point of an exto- an expo- um.”

“Exposition?” Papa supplies. 

“Ex-po-si-tion. It’s to tell us about what it’s like before the journey, so we know how it’s different after. It _has_ to be different after.”

Dad’s eyes are crinkled all around the edges now, like they got that time Teddy took the book from his hands and started reading aloud to _him_ , or the first time he drew up a mosaic pattern by himself because he thought the blue tiles would look better on the other side instead, or when he brought Jack and Maisie Cutter over after school one day without asking and told Dad and Papa that the Cutters didn’t have enough to eat at home and so they would just have to feed them here.

Papa looks between the two of them and laughs softly. “Have I ever told you you’re incredibly precocious?” he asks, in his _I love you_ voice. 

“Yes,” says Teddy. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“It means you make a decent point,” says Dad. 

~

Nothing. 

Void. 

A darkness that was not the absence of light, but of everything. 

And then — through it — barely glowing —

There. A sharp, bright pain. Faint with distance. It would have been impossible to notice, were it not the only thing left. 

But it was there. 

And it burned. 

~

The forest. 

The little pulsing light on the map Eliot had enchanted had settled deep in the forest just before it flickered and went dark — a sure sign that Reynard had entered a place protected by wards. Of _course_ Reynard would make his lair in the middle of the fucking woods, like some kind of fanged, clawed, burrowing animal. The man had no style. He was the most obviously evil person Eliot had ever met, and he couldn’t even do _that_ properly. Always… smiling. Simpering. _Ugh_. 

(Quentin was fine. He had to be fine. And Reynard was a useless, gormless, incompetent asskisser-to-the-king, because he had to be, because if he wasn’t, if he had an ounce of the capability Eliot feared he did then that meant- that meant that he- that Quentin might, he might already… But he wasn’t. He didn’t. Quentin was fine.)

Eliot could find him now. He could save him. He would mark this spot, and then wait until Reynard had left it to sneak in. 

But first he would need help to evade the palace guards. A distraction, perhaps. “Todd,” he called out. 

“I’m not here, Your Highness,” Todd answered from behind a pillar. 

“Excellent. How would you like to keep that doublet of mine that you like so much?”

~

It was a pretty gruesome scene. 

The secret door in the tree — and how corny was that, by the way — led to an underground room that resembled a cross between a torture chamber and a magic laboratory. The walls, floor, and ceiling were packed dirt, with little hollows dug into the walls serving as shelves which contained all sorts of spell components. Some of them Margo recognized. Some of them she didn’t. A few, she wished she didn’t. Against the far wall was a desk, an open notebook sitting on it, the ink still wet on its pages. Someone had been recording data. And in the center of the room was a long wooden table, fitted with shackles at either end. On it lay Quentin. 

Well. She had to assume it was Quentin. She didn’t know his face, and his shirt was missing, but that was definitely the same stupid mustache. He was clearly in bad shape, even aside from the facial hair. He looked pale and malnourished, and he wasn’t moving. His wrists and ankles were raw from having been restrained. The shackles were open now, but Margo had a feeling that was not a good sign. 

After all, there was no point restraining the dead. 

A quick check of his heavily abraded wrist seemed to confirm her suspicions.

“Don’t bother,” said Julia. She was leaning heavily on Alice, still weak from the spell but remaining upright with a little help and a lot of sheer, indefatigable stubbornness. “You won’t find a pulse.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I just did. I think we’re still connected. I think…” Julia shook her head. “We’ll figure it out later. Right now, I just. I need to sit.”

Alice guided her over to the chair at the desk while Margo continued to inspect Quentin’s body. There were sigils drawn on his face and body, though she didn’t recognize them, and she certainly didn’t know what they’d been drawn with. Something fucking gross, and she didn’t want to know any more than that. He was surrounded with tallow candles, melted down into stubs on the wood. In the center of his chest rested a strange crystal. 

Margo picked it up, held it up to the dim torchlight. It looked an awful lot like a quartz point, but it was nearly opaque and colored a deep, bloody red. It felt… wrong, to hold. “What _is_ this?” she wondered aloud. 

“His life.”

Margo turned. Julia was slumped over the desk, reading the notebook. “More of it than I’ve ever seen before,” she continued, sounding as though she didn’t realize she was still speaking. “I didn’t know he could take so much. But I guess he figured it out.”

Alice leaned in to squint at the notebook over Julia’s shoulder. “Julia, what are you talking about? Who figured it out?”

“Shady Dickhead,” Julia muttered, and then laughed like her throat was rusted. “It’s him. It’s the Yellow-Eyed Man. All these years and I just… stumble right into him.” Her laughter turned to coughing, and Alice gripped her shoulder to hold her upright.

Margo caught Alice’s eye. Understanding passed between them. Julia had been seeking the Yellow-Eyed Man as long as they had known her. Now he was within her reach, and whatever she saw fit to do about it, there would be no stopping or diverting her course. There was really only one thing to do. 

“Alright,” said Margo. “Julia, you take the reins. What’s our next move?” Because that one thing was: stand by her and keep her from getting herself killed in the process. 

Julia closed her eyes and drew in a long breath, then looked up again on the inhale. “First of all,” she said, “we get Quentin out of here. And we take that crystal with us. I have a hunch about this spell.” She rose stiffly and Alice hurried to support her.

“Maybe you should take a minute to recover first,” said Alice, pulling Julia’s arm around her shoulders. 

“I can’t. Not if I’m right about this.” Julia took the notebook and made for the exit tunnel, dragging Alice along with her more than anything. “We have to get to the Flying Forest,” she said, “and fast.” 

”Hold up,” said Margo. They did not hold up. “Wait, what, so I’m just supposed to carry this limp dick myself?” she called into the tunnel. “Hello?” 

No answer. Those bitches. 

She shoved the crystal in her pocket and looked at Quentin. “Alright, you fuckin Tom Selleck lookalike contest eighth-place-runner-up. We’re about to get real familiar with each other.” She grabbed his arms, turned her back to the table, and hoisted. 

_Oof._

He teetered on her shoulders. Oh, this was _not_ a long term transport option. Margo stomped up the tunnel after her colleagues. “Hey assholes!” she called. “We are _definitely_ stopping to grab the gravity belt!”

~

Nothingness, still. Void, still. 

But he wasn’t alone in it. 

He couldn’t see through the darkness, couldn’t hear through the silence, couldn’t smell or taste or feel. It was as though he’d been cast down to the bottom of the ocean. But he didn’t need his mundane senses to know her presence. 

_Funny meeting you here_ , he tried to say, _and oh, by the way, where is exactly is here?_

He tried. But he had no tongue or breath or body, and neither did she. Not here. 

_Am I dead?_

_Are_ you _dead?_

_Seems strange that we should be here together. We only met the one time._

He didn’t speak, and Julia didn’t answer. 

And in the quiet, something burned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took me SO long to write. my brain kept saying “no actually we are not going to think about this today, or maybe ever.” that’s fair, brain
> 
> anyway i know i keep telling you that chapters are gonna come slowly but. well. next one’s gonna come slowly. life, man


	9. The Workshop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> posting a new chapter of this is always like. half my brain is chanting _post it, post it, post it,_ and the other half is like i can’t!! it’s not ready!!! but the first half is just a whole lot more persistent
> 
> anyway. logistics are hard. making up new spells on the fly is nothing but trying to keep track of how much time has passed? impossible. both in universe and in general

The den was empty. 

Or, well, no. That wasn’t precisely accurate. The den was crammed full of all manner of unpleasant things upon whose purposes Eliot didn’t particularly care to speculate. Whatever their functions, they weren’t serving them now. Because the den was empty. Quentin wasn’t here. 

He had been so certain. 

He had been _so_ —

But this was neither the time nor the place for this. He could sink into despair once he was back at Whitespire. Right now, he needed to leave before Reynard came back. Before the guards noticed he had slipped out of the castle. Before Ember got impatient with his disobedience and moved up his plans for the honeymoon. Todd’s distraction would only keep for so long, after all.

So Eliot made his way up the tunnel and through the woods and into the castle and shut his door behind him. 

And then, miraculously, and in defiance of his own expectations, he did _not_ sink into despair. The miserable trek through the forest had given him time to think. And thinking on things had given him something far more productive to sink into: fury. 

Wherever Quentin was, whatever he was suffering, it was all at the behest of King Ember. Eliot had known Ember to be a petty tyrant from the day he’d put a crown on him and him on a horse and the horse on the road to Whitespire. And he’d hated him, sure, viewed him with resentment and disgust for all this time. But this? This new measure of cruelty? This was simply the last thing he would take. 

And Quentin… well. Q wouldn’t want him sinking into despair, anyway. He was a man of action. They both were. Surrender did not become them. There were things left to be done. There was _always_ something left to be done. 

Eliot washed off the grime of the woods, dressed in fresh clothes, and knocked on the door of Fen’s chambers. 

He should probably go collect Todd, tell him he could stop wreaking whatever havoc he’d cooked up for a distraction (he had come across some moderately creative gravitational anomalies on his way through the castle), but frankly? He didn’t fucking care right now. That was a problem for later. 

Fen answered swiftly, pulling him inside and shutting the door without pausing to greet him. “Eliot! How did it go? Todd told me you’d run off without explanation so I thought — well, I stood up in the middle of a council meeting and talked about dam construction on the Burnt River displacing the talking salmon’s hatching grounds for like forty-five minutes to keep Reynard preoccupied — did you find him?”

Eliot looked down at her, at her bright eyes and her flyaway locks and the crease of concern between her brows. He looked at the letters piled on her desk (written in careful code, no doubt) and her bed, crisply made (had she had any time to sleep, absorbed as she was in revolutionary scheming?). He took her hands in his. 

“To be honest,” he said, “I would rather not discuss my failures. Well, except for one in particular. Fen, I’ve failed to do my part for you, and for Fillory. But mostly you.”

Fen frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re running yourself ragged, plotting this coup without even being able to rely on me for support. Which, you know, is a terrible omen for our marriage.” Eliot raised a wry brow and she snorted. “Tell me what I can do to contribute.”

Fen looked worried a moment longer, her eyes darting over his face as if she would find answers there. But she recovered quickly, taking the subject change in stride. _Lovely_ girl, his Fen. “Why, Prince Eliot,” she said.“Are you proposing we overthrow the king together?”

“Oh, _hell_ yes. Let’s put the guillotine to this musty bitch.”

Fen grinned. “Sit,” she said, steering him to her bed. “We have much to discuss.”

~

At the very edge of the Flying Forest, in a verdant field just outside the range of its intoxicant properties, stood a stout little shack. It was small and squarish and sturdy, constructed simply of the strong wood of Flying Forest trees. It was surrounded almost to the point of unnavigability with odd, irregular garden patches that overflowed with all manner of plants, flowers and vegetables and lush fruiting shrubs that seemed to bear six entirely different crops. Each. The whole affair was surrounded by a crooked wooden fence which bore a sign reading, in carefully painted letters:

**PROPERTY OF MIRACLE JOSH**  
**NO STEALING**  
(THIS MEANS YOU, RAPUNZELMANS. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ASK NICELY FOR SOME CABBAGES I DON’T KNOW WHY THIS IS SO HARD)

Julia didn’t know Josh very well. This was her first time ever visiting his home. But she was certain he would do what he could to help them. He owed Margo and Alice a debt, something about saving his life and bringing him to Fillory in the first place. Julia wasn’t sure of the details; it had all happened before her arrival. The important thing was that he would help. 

Alice rapped sharply on the front door. There were some muffled sounds from inside, as if someone had startled at the noise and knocked something over. And then as if he had knocked it over a few more times while trying to right it. The door creaked partway open. “Oh, hey guys,” said Josh, sticking his head out. “I wasn’t, uh, wasn’t really expecting company; I hope you don’t mind some mess. What can I do for you?”

Margo gestured to Quentin, who was floating limply in the air courtesy of the gravity belt. “We’ve got a patient for you to look at.”

“Aw, come on, guys,” protested Josh, “you _know_ I’m not a healer. Just cause I’m a miracle worker doesn’t mean I can heal your sick.”

“He’s not sick,” said Julia. “He’s dead.”

Josh blinked. “Oh. Dead, huh? Now _that_ I might be able to do something about.” The door swung open fully. “Come on in.”

~

“So,” Fen concluded, a little breathless. She’d gotten a little overenthusiastic toward the end, at some point crossing over from simply explaining the plan into full pantomime, complete with different voices for all the major players involved. “What do you think?”

“Well,” said Eliot, “I think it’s a good thing I warded the room before you began. And I think there’s another universe somewhere out there where your name is lighting up Broadway.”

Fen tilted her head, puzzled. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Ember isn’t gonna have any idea what hit him.”

Fen broke into a grin. “You think it’ll work?”

“I think you’re more qualified to say than I am,” Eliot pointed out. “You’re the one with all the experience here. I’m not so much a planner; my talents lie more in the realm of just doing the damn thing.”

“Well, that’s exactly what we need you for,” Fen told him. “We have the plan already. What we need is to execute it efficiently. There’s a lot to be done, even before the wedding, a lot of preparation we’ll need to do, and you’re the strongest caster we have inside the castle.” 

Eliot nodded, looking thoughtful. “Are you sure I’ll be enough? This is… elaborate. Who else do we have on hand?” 

Well. The truth was: virtually no one. Magicians were rarely hired to work inside Whitespire, probably for exactly this reason. Fen hadn’t wanted to mention it earlier, fearing that Eliot would feel obligated to offer his assistance. This was going to be dangerous. There could be casualties. It wouldn’t be right to ask anyone to do this out of anything less than wholehearted dedication to the cause. She sat on the bed beside Eliot, crossing her legs pretzel style. “Look. I know that this is a lot. And I won’t lie to you; our chances are better with you on our side. But if you want to back out-”

“Fen, please.” Eliot rolled his eyes. “I already told you, I’m at your disposal. Just point me at whatever you need done.”

“I just want to be sure you’ve considered the risks. I’ve had a long time to think about this, Eliot.” Months. Years. Her whole life, it felt like, from the very day she was born into a land ruled by a petty despot. But Eliot, in the larger scheme of things, had only just arrived in Fillory. “You’ve only had a few days,” she told him gently. 

“And in those few days I’ve learned that Ember is an even crueler king than I knew him to be in all the time I’ve been his plaything. My life is on the line, Fen, and the lives of everyone I love. Admittedly, that doesn’t amount to very many people, but a rare resource is a precious one.” Eliot took her hand in his and looked her in the eye determinedly, impressing upon her the meaning of his words. “Tell me what you need from me, and I will do it.”

Fen let out a long breath, squeezing his hand. “Okay. You should start working on the castle’s defensive wards, then. There are a lot of them, and they’ll have to be altered in advance. Hold on, I’ll get the map.” She retrieved a scroll from beneath her bed and flattened it out to show him. “These are all the wards we know about. Some of them will be deactivated for the wedding to let guests in, but others are like failsafes that respond to fights breaking out — here, look.”

They hunched over the map, discussing what would need to be done. The details of the spellwork went over Fen’s head, but she knew how to strategize, understood the palace’s layout and could see which wards ought to be prioritized on their tight schedule. And Eliot knew exactly how to use the information she gave him. They made an effective little team. 

It boded well, Fen thought, for the marriage they would no longer be forced to go through with. She smiled at the thought and directed Eliot’s attention to the throne room. 

~

Josh’s home was always a little bit of a shock to walk into. It wasn’t the size of it as compared to its modest outward appearance — Alice was used to seeing Thibadeau’s Planar Compression at work. She hadn’t been impressed by that sort of thing since she was about six. No, it was the sheer volume of _stuff_ inside. 

The place was an open, sprawling, airy _mess_ , crammed with mismatched furniture and strange little knickknacks and pots and pots of plants, as if the garden outside just wasn’t enough to hold them all and they’d overflowed right into the house. There were scores of books but it seemed like even odds that Josh ever read any of them; some were lined up on shelves, but plenty were stuck under wobbly table legs or stacked into pillars to raise plants closer to the sunlight — a skylight and an elaborate setup of mirrors ensured they each got their fill. Nothing separated the workshop from the kitchen from the living room from the bedroom from whatever other nooks and crannies Josh had conjured but an arrangement of curtains that hung from the high ceiling all the way to the dark wood floors. They were all different, one thick and velvety, one gauzy and translucent, one a soft dusty mauve, one the ugliest paisley Alice had ever seen in her life. Josh tugged that one shut sheepishly, hiding some kind of culinary catastrophe in the kitchen behind him. 

“Hey, uh, pay no attention to the flan behind the curtain, am I right?” he said, tripping a little over the trailing fabric. 

“That is absolutely not how you pronounce flan,” said Margo. 

“Right, good to see you too,” said Josh. “Put the stiff on the table.” He pulled another curtain shut behind them, this one burgundy and dripping with beads that clicked and clattered with the motion, enclosing them in the workshop area. 

“He’s not exactly stiff yet,” Julia pointed out, leading Quentin’s floating body through the air by the gravity belt, like some kind of fucked up balloon. “We got him here as fast as we could manage.” She deposited him on the table and unbuckled the belt. 

“And how prescient of you to do so,” Josh said. He turned Quentin’s head back and forth, lifted his hands into the air and let them fall back onto the table, pulled his eyelids open to look at his eyes. “Yup. Mhmm. This one’s still kickin’.”

“Kickin’?” asked Julia, a little mystified. She wasn’t used to Josh. 

“Yup. Like, _real_ strong. It’s weird, actually; usually you lose your juice like, within a few minutes of dying. What did you do, murder this guy on my doorstep?” Josh looked genuinely concerned about the idea. 

“Actually,” said Alice, “it’s been a couple hours.”

“Since you murdered him?”

“Since we _found_ him, Josh, keep your khakis on.” Margo rolled her eye. 

His suspicions apparently alleviated, Josh went back to prodding at Quentin’s body. “Huh. Well, this is an unusual case, then, ‘cause after a few hours they’re usually all dead. This guy here is only _mostly_ dead, which is real lucky for you, ‘cause it means we might be able to help him. If he was _all_ dead, there’s really only one thing you could do.”

Julia looked nervous. And alarmingly pallid, but she’d looked that way since she’d collapsed earlier. “...What’s that?”

Josh blinked. “Hold a funeral. Duh. What, did you think I was gonna say something creepy?” He looked forlornly at Alice and Margo. “What have you been telling people about me?”

Margo’s eye lit up. Alice, sensing she was about to invent some outrageously awful lie, cut her off before she could begin. “Can we get to business, please? Before we really do have to hold a funeral.” 

“Alright, alright. You know, you rush a miracle man, you get a shoddy miracle.”

Alice felt her patience waning. “I’m not trying to rush you, Josh, just reminding you that we’re kind of on a schedule.”

“Seconded,” gasped Julia, falling forward to brace herself on the table. Her arms shook beneath her own weight. “Yeah. Kind of in a hurry here.” Margo grabbed a nearby chair and shoved it under Julia, taking her knees out from under her. Julia leaned back in it and closed her eyes, her face tense and unnaturally wan. “Thanks.”

Josh stared at them, then at Alice. “See?” said Alice. “Schedule.”

“O…kay. Is anyone gonna explain that to me?”

“We’re linked,” said Julia, her eyes still closed, her voice a little hoarse. Margo’s knuckles were white on the back of her chair. “We were bound through blood magic when he died. I can feel him still. He’s… heavy. Dead weight. I think I’m what’s keeping him here, but I won’t last long. He’ll drag me under with him.”

“Well, shit,” said Josh, throwing open two different cabinets and rooting through one with each hand. “Why didn’t you _say_ this was an emergency?”

“We brought you a corpse,” Alice pointed out. “It seemed self evident!”

“Corpses are the _least_ urgent clients!” Josh had his head inside a cupboard now, his voice echoing strangely from within. “Like, they’re already dead, what else is gonna happen to ‘em?” He emerged with a mortar and pestle in one hand, a small brass balance in the other, and three little fabric pouches clenched between his teeth. “Arrigh,” he slurred, “leh’sh geh shar-ehd.”

~

A well-cast ward was a bit like a well-woven fabric. The threads of magic were not so tangible nor so cleanly defined as actual thread, but if you knew how — if you were deft enough to pick through the fine strands — you could find the way the magic flowed, the warp and the weft of it, and tug and twist until you had made something new. Pull out the fraying threads and snake new, stronger spells into place. Or yank out strong threads, forceful and careless, puckering the fabric and leaving gaps that would make it weaker. Or — hmm. Ah, yes. Or weave them back in, reversed this time. See how that little adjustment suited the king. 

Eliot didn’t like to brag, but he was pretty fucking deft if he said so himself. Also, he sort of _did_ like to brag. He would refrain, though, as this was not the time. 

“Just thinking about the decorations,” he explained to a nosy palace guard. “For the wedding, you know. Deciding which flowers would look best in this archway.” Eliot smiled vacantly as the guard suggested poppies, then continued smiling until he cleared his throat awkwardly and wandered away. 

Poppies. _Really_. There was a reason no one listened to Carver. 

Eliot set a boundary that would alert him to any more guards approaching and continued his work. A fold here, a stitch there. A bit of sabotage where it seemed most prudent. 

This place was a monument to misery, and he was going to burn it to the fucking ground. 

~

Josh’s work didn’t make any goddamn sense to Julia but he, at least, seemed to know exactly what he was doing. In no time at all he had combined a series of strange ingredients into a pill he seemed certain would work, based on whatever he had reverse-engineered from the foul ooze that had been painted on Quentin’s body. Then he coated it in chocolate so it would go down easier. The idea of mostly-dead Quentin having a pill jammed forcibly down his throat was honestly a little undignified, but if it worked, it worked.

Only, well, it didn’t work. Or, not on its own, it wouldn’t.

“The pill is a focus,” Josh explained as he painted the chocolate on. “It draws the magic into him and releases it in doses the body can take. See, raising the dead is a delicate process; you try to do it all at once and the rush of life force burns right through them, and whoever else is close enough. And then you just end up with _more_ dead bodies.” He held the pill up in a pair of tongs. “Uh, would you?” Margo made a few clean tuts and froze the chocolate solid. “Thanks. And, uh, speaking of life force… you guys knows the price for something like this.”

“Price?” Julia frowned up at him from where she was seated. “I thought this was a favor.”

“Oh, it is,” Josh assured her. “But…”

“It’s not that kind of price,” Alice explained. “Life force has to come from somewhere, and it’s not exactly cheap.”

“Now that’s a broad generalization,” argued Margo. “I’ve met people who are worth about a nickel on a good day.”

“Sorry, are we talking about human sacrifice right now?” asked Julia. “It sounds like we’re talking about human sacrifice.”

“Well, first of all, that’s an ugly term and I don’t like it.” Josh waved his tongs for emphasis. “And second, no, jeez, no, we’re not sacrificing anyone. But, well, energy can’t be created or destroyed, it’s like a law, you know? Thermodynamics. Same principle applies. So I _will_ need a, uh, _donation_.” He deposited the pill in Quentin’s mouth. “I can take a little bit from each of you; just enough to revive him. It’s no big deal, really. But I do recommend you have some cookies and juice afterward, and maybe stay on bed rest for a week or so. And uhh… side effects may occur. Weird ones. This isn’t exactly FDA-approved.” He looked up from Quentin to meet Julia’s eyes somberly. “Honestly, you could die even with the precautions.”

Julia squeezed her eyes shut for a second and swallowed dryly. Normally she’d want to know all about the magical theory behind this, but her head was fucking throbbing, reminding her with each wave of pain and dizziness just how tight their schedule was right now. “Yeah, uh, no thanks,” she told Josh. “We have a better idea.”

Josh blinked. “A better idea than obeying the laws of magical science?”

“Yup,” said Margo. She pulled the crystal out of her pocket and plunked it down on the table beside Quentin’s head. “You ever seen a man’s life inside a rock before?”

Josh blinked some more. “Uhh. No?”

“Well, treasure this new experience, Hoberman.”

Josh, still blinking, picked up the crystal. And promptly dropped it. “Holy _yikes_ , that thing feels haunted.”

“Tell me about it,” said Margo. “But actually don’t. Just figure out how to get the life out of it, and back in Quentin.”

“Yeah, fair,” said Josh, a little faintly. He was still looking warily at the crystal. “It’s just. My spellwork is sort of tailored for a person-to-person transfer. Your friend is still, you know, hanging around, he hasn't left the building, but he _has_ left this plane. A crystal can't grab him by the collar and yank him back into his body the way a person can.”

“I'll do it," said Julia, sounding a little hoarser than she’d like. Margo and Alice’s eyes snapped to her at once, clouded with worry, but she wasn't interested in their reservations. “I'm already connected to him; I've kept him here this long," she continued. "I'll pull him back into his body, and you run the life force through me like a conduit.”

“You can’t even stand,” protested Alice.

Julia looked at Josh. “Do I need to stand for the spell?”

“Well, no.” Josh looked vaguely apologetic about it.

“Then let’s save some time and skip the argument. Tell me what I need to do.”

~

Her presence was growing stronger. Or, no, not stronger. Closer. Quentin didn’t know how to tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing, partly because he was a little fuzzy on what constituted “good” and “bad” and why those concepts were important at all. It was so hard to think here. It was so dark.

The burn of his wound dimmed as she drew closer and closer.

It wasn’t until — well, it was hard to say. Time didn’t seem to be present here. But he had been watching Julia drift toward him for a while before he realized that he was moving too, in the same direction. She was — above him, maybe. And they were both sinking, but she was sinking faster. Soon there would be no distance between them. The pain would fade entirely. The darkness would be complete.

~

They prepared the spell quickly. And thank fuck for it, because it was plain to see Julia was fading fast. Now all they had to do was boot her consciousness out of her body into the ether and use her like a fishhook to reel in some mostly-dead guy they’d met exactly once. Because that was where they were at right now. 

Margo just hoped to whatever god might be listening that the line didn’t snap while Julia was floating out there. Alice, standing beside her, arms crossed, lips pursed tight enough to draw back a bowstring, seemed to be thinking much the same. 

But Julia, stretched out on a folding cot Josh had dragged in from another room, the crystal clutched to her chest in both hands, seemed unconcerned. She was almost serene in her determination. “How will I know when it starts working?” She asked. And then her muscles went slack, her eyes flickering shut. She was unconscious. The crystal began to glow, its bloody crimson light pooling on her chest and spilling over her body until she seemed lit from within.

“I think that’s a pretty good indication,” said Josh. 

~ 

And then there was light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i did consider having mayakovsky play miracle max, courtesy of a comment by soliyra. but ultimately i decided that i hate mayakovsky and i don’t wanna write him being a helpful character. if i ever write mayakovsky it’ll be in a story about emily greenstreet pushing him into a river while everyone else cheers
> 
> i’m ~excited~ for the next chapter, but the next chapter isn’t excited for me. it’s playing hard to get. we’ll see how it goes


	10. The Void

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who’s back, bitches! hey remember when i used to update every week? well....... look i don't really have an excuse for this taking an entire month. just....... just take it. it's yours now

Julia opened her eyes in a luminous white space. At least, _space_ was the best word she had for it. It didn’t seem to be enclosed by any boundaries at all; no walls, no ceiling, no horizon. There wasn’t even a floor to stand on. She simply stood on her feet, steady by her own power. She expected herself to remain upright, and so she did. 

She wasn’t alone here. A few yards away, or so she imagined in this setting outside of measurements like _distance_ and _time_ , was a slight, shaggy-haired boy. He was sprawled flat as if he had tripped, leaning up on his elbows to look down at himself as though unhurt but baffled by the fall. 

“Quentin,” she called out to him. 

He looked up, blinking for a moment before recognition set in. “Julia?”

She was standing beside him then, without ever taking a step. She reached out to help him up and saw that her hand was small and soft, unmarred by the calluses of years of swordplay. It looked as it had in her childhood. This wasn’t her body, she knew, the way one knows things in dreams — or, no, more natural than that. The way one knows to breathe or blink without instruction. She knew with a knowledge innate to her being that this was not her body but her shade, and Quentin’s as well. 

Quentin took her childlike hand in his and allowed her to pull him to his feet. “Hey,” he said, pulling back his hand to wave sort of awkwardly at her — only when they separated a spark snapped through the space where they had touched, static and strange. “Huh,” said Quentin. “I don’t think that’s normal.”

“No,” agreed Julia. “That was probably the spell.”

“Spell?”

“Yeah, we…” It occurred to her now that he had no idea of any of this, nor had he been allowed to have any say. “Margo and Alice and I, we cast a spell. To find you, when you were taken. Blood magic. I think we’re sort of… linked, now. Here.” She gestured between the two of them. 

His eyebrows had been climbing steadily higher as she spoke. “Like, by the shade, you mean?”

“Yeah. I didn’t realize the connection would run so deep when we cast the spell. I’m sorry, I…” she trailed off. She didn’t really know how to apologize for saving his life by accidentally stapling their souls together. 

“Okay. Uh. How did you even know that I was — okay, hold on, this is stupid. Words are clunky.” Quentin’s brows knit together, creasing his forehead. She could see where the wrinkles would form on his little face. Where they had already begun to, on his real body, back in the physical world. “Um, let me try…” He clasped her hand again, and again, that spark —

Oh. 

Yes, this was more efficient, wasn’t it. 

She let him tug at the thread of the last few days in her memory, gently unravel it, follow it to its end. To now. To this place that was not a place. He took it all in, seeing, feeling, understanding, the spell she had cast and the reasons she had cast it. He projected gratitude and grimness in equal measure. In turn he gave to her pieces of his own memory. Not the whole thread, no, he spared her that. She could feel the thought he parceled up with it all, _You don’t want to see all of it, you don’t want to relive it, I know, it’s him, it’s him, it’s-_

She pulled back, ignoring the way the spell stung her retreating fingers. “It is,” she said quietly. “You’re right. It’s him.” She blinked a few times, quick and heavy. 

“You saved me,” said Quentin. His voice was soft. Soft as the glow surrounding them, soft as their small hands. “You didn’t let him kill another innocent.”

“I know,” she said, meeting his eyes again. 

He nodded. “Although, um. I mean, I _am_ a pirate. So I’m not really sure I qualify for, you know, the ‘innocents’ category.”

She laughed then. She couldn’t help it. It was hard to be burdened here. “You’re close enough,” she told him. “But I’m not quite done saving you yet. Let me finish the job?”

He smiled easily, all dimples and slightly crooked teeth. “Yeah, okay,” he said, and offered her his hands. 

She took them with a smile of her own. “Back the way we came.”

~

Julia awoke with a great, heaving gasp, her body jerking upward as if pulled by a string attached to her sternum. The motion jolted her nearly upright before she fell back to the cot below her, scrabbling at her throat as she drew in breath after rapid breath. The crystal fell from her hands and rolled onto the floor, drained entirely of color. 

Alice was at her side in an instant, hands hovering nervously about as she tried to figure out what the fuck she was supposed to do to help. She settled on pressing a hand to Julia’s back, supporting her as she sat up on the cot. Alice knew about Josh’s miracle work, sure, had drunk in all he could tell her about the theory of it, but she’d never actually been _involved_ before, and she was feeling a little out of her depth. Julia’s cheeks were flushed pink, though, her skin so feverish Alice could feel the warmth from inches away and, given the icy pallor of the last few hours, Alice was taking that as a good sign. 

It couldn’t hurt to check, though. “Is she alright?” she asked Josh. “Is this normal?”

“Yeah, just give her a minute.” Josh patted at Julia’s forehead with a folded up cloth, dabbing away beads of sweat. “Takes a lot out of you, making it all the way to heaven’s door and ding-dong-ditching like that. She’ll be alright.”

Margo swept aside the curtain with a cacophony of clicking beads and marched back into the room with a cup of water — Alice hadn’t even noticed her leaving. She crouched beside the cot and waited for Julia to take the cup in her still-shaking hands. “That’s it,” she encouraged, as Julia brought the cup to her mouth. “Okay, well, maybe not that fast. Shit, slow down before you drown in there.”

Julia set the cup down on the table, nearly knocking it to the floor as a tremor ran through her. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”

Margo straightened up with a shrug. “First thing I always need after a rough night.” She cleared her throat. “By the way, Josh, I banished your flan while I was in the kitchen. Did you a favor.”

“You... banished it? To where?“

“Just banished it.”

“Yeah, but banished things have to _go_ somewhere. We were _just_ talking about conservation of mass and energy.”

“So did it work?” Alice asked. This was entertaining and all, but there were more pressing matters. Also it wasn’t particularly entertaining, actually. “Did you bring him back; he’s not pulling you down anymore?”

“Yeah,” said Julia. “It worked. We’re both gonna live.” She looked... peaceful. Alice realized with a little jolt of shock that Julia had never looked that way in all the time she had known her. Perhaps longer. “Check his pulse,” she said, her voice still raw, but certain now. “It’ll be faint. But it’s there.”

She was right. Quentin’s body — _Quentin_ — still hadn’t moved. He looked as lifeless as he had when they’d found him. But his blood thrummed quietly beneath the two fingers Alice pressed to his wrist. She passed it over to Margo, who felt it as well. 

“I’ll be damned,” murmured Margo, setting Quentin’s arm down carefully. “Julia, you’re officially a necromancer.”

“I mean, I feel like I should get _some_ of the credit,” said Josh. “Hold on, my flan was still in the pan. Did you banish my baking pan too?”

“Not the time, Josh.”

“I _liked_ that pan.”

“Do you have any idea when he’ll be strong enough to wake up?” asked Julia. 

“Ehh, it’s hard to say. The life force gets released in doses the body can take, and that all depends on him. It sounds like he went through a lot before you got to him, so it could be a while.” Josh nudged and prodded at Quentin’s unconscious body, much as he had when they’d first put him on the table. “Hours. Days, maybe. Honestly, Julia, you might have a better idea than I do.”

Julia nodded, then squeezed her eyes shut in concentration. “He’s healing,” she murmured. “But it’s slow. He feels like... like sparks. A fire that hasn’t caught yet.” She opened her eyes. “I don’t think he’s gonna be walking out of here.”

“Yeah, that seems unlikely. But seriously, the baking pan-“

“Nose goes for holding the gravity belt,” said Margo. 

Alice watched in dismay as everyone touched their noses immediately. “Oh, goddamn it. Josh, you’re not even coming with us.”

Josh shrugged, still touching his nose. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“Yeah, respect the game, Alice.” Julia rose to her feet, teetering slightly. Alice and Margo grabbed a shoulder each. “Oh, come on, I’m fine.” She swatted at their hands. “I’m good to walk, I swear.”

Alice glared. “The gravity belt has room for two, you know.”

“Ooh, wait a minute,” said Margo. “Put a pin in that.” She rubbed her hands together like a mischievous cartoon character. “Why don’t you sit back down, Julia. There’s just one little thing I wanna take care of before we leave.”

~

Teddy is feeling remarkably self-satisfied. “I _told_ you they would bring Westley back,” he says. 

Dad rolls his eyes. “Yes, you did. You’re very smart, congratulations.”

“Ignore him,” Papa whispers loudly. “He’s just cranky because we didn’t like his flan joke.”

Teddy giggles into Papa’s shirt. 

“Sshhh, don’t tell him I said that.”

Dad crosses his arms. “Another remark like that, and Prince Buttercup will marry Todd the foot servant.”

“Darling, you would _never_ be so cruel. Or so heedless of narrative structure.”

Dad gets that face like he’s about to start arguing about rabies again. 

“Maybe if we pretend to laugh at his flan joke he’ll go back to telling the story,” Teddy whispers to Papa. 

“Oh, good idea,” Papa agrees. “Count of three. Ready?” Teddy nods. “One, two, three.” They both laugh uproariously, clutching their stomachs and wiping away imaginary tears. 

Dad puts his face in his hands. “I try to be a good father,” he says into his palms. “A good partner. And for what?” he spreads his hands and looks up to the ceiling, like maybe it’s going to answer his question.

“Love?” suggests Papa. 

“Hmm. No, that can’t be it.”

“Well, don’t teach our son to _lie_ , Q.”

“I already know how to lie,” Teddy assures him. “It was a _really_ funny joke, Dad.”

Papa’s laugh isn’t fake this time.

~

Fen woke in the night. She lay still in her bed, listening for what had woken her. A quiet rustling made itself known, then the whisper of a voice muttering to itself. A shadowy shape loomed over her desk, sifting through papers by the glow of a little floating orb of light. 

Fen sat up, squinting. “Eliot?” 

The light winked out. The rustling stopped, the sillhouette stilling. It hunched slightly, as if in apology. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Eliot said. 

“It’s alright.” Fen stifled a yawn. “You should go to bed, though. Get some rest. It must be — what? Two in the morning?”

“Three.”

Fen looked at the shape of him for a moment. In daylight he was bright and bold, ten feet tall and draped in rich fabrics, every gesture broad and sweeping. He caught every eye. He filled every room. Now, in the darkness, his voice pitched low, now on this moonless night, with no light to catch on him and set him agleam — it struck her how thin he was. How insubstantial. He could turn sideways and slip out of sight. Slip out of the world, and leave her with only shadows for company. Fen shut her eyes and lay back on the pillows. “Get some sleep, Eliot. We need to be well rested for what’s ahead.”

“I will,” he said. “I will, I just... wanted to look over the map one more time.”

“Eliot.” There was a council meeting in the morning. He’d be tipping over in his chair, if he even made it out of his chambers. 

He didn’t speak for a long moment, and when he did it was almost quieter than the silence. “This is all I can do, Fen. Just this one thing. Let me do it.”

Silence again, for long enough that Fen felt the soft edge of sleep wash over her. There was no movement from the desk. Eliot was waiting. Waiting for her to let him. 

“Okay,” she said. “One more time.” The rustling began again. It reminded her of dry leaves in the wind. “Look it over one more time and then come to bed.” Wheat in the fields. Her long skirts against the grass. “You shouldn’t wander the halls at night. Sleep here.”

“Alright.”

Fen slept then. Her dreams were full of blood and smoke. She walked through the palace with her knives in her hands, each room another battle, each battle a new wound. Flames licked at her clothing, the curtains and tapestries all smoldering into ash. And then she felt an arm wrap around her shoulders, sheltering her in familiar warmth, and she walked through the fire unafraid.

~

His first thought was, _Ouch_.

His second thought was, _I wonder if anyone took down the license plate of the horse that trampled me_.

His third thought was, _Wait, that doesn’t make any sense_.

It was at that point, in his haze of disorientation, that he noticed there were voices in the room with him. He tried to focus, to understand what they were saying, but the moment he did they quieted. There was a moment of silence, and then one of them spoke again: “What, Jules?”

“He’s awake.” That was Julia — he would’ve known it even if the other voice hadn’t said her name. Margo or Alice, he guessed. He wasn’t sure. He’d only met them the one time, and _they_ didn’t have a direct line to his shade, so he figured he could be excused for not recognizing them by sound alone.

Oh, god, his shade. They were still all — stuck together, soulwise. How the hell were they going to fix that? How was he going to fix anything? He was too weak to even open his eyes. He was trying right now; the little bastards were firmly stuck shut.

“Okay, first of all, try to chill out,” said Julia’s voice. “I can feel you starting to spiral and that’s probably not great for your recovery.” A wave of calm resolve washed over him, powerful enough to drown out the beginnings of panic. That was… nice, actually. Convenient. This whole blood magic thing was turning out to be pretty useful.

“That’s good,” said Julia. “Now listen.” There was a warm touch to his forehead — 

And it all rushed into him, everything he had missed. The resurrection spell, Josh explaining the extended release of life force. God, no wonder he still felt so weak. He was still, like, one quarter dead. Julia, Alice, and Margo taking him back to Julia’s home, where he’d been convalescing for — shit, for _days_ , and how long had he been in Fillory now? His crew was fine, he was certain of it; they could more than fend for themselves. But his first mate was going to kick his ass for leaving her to wrangle the lot of them on her own. His navigator too, probably, the two of them were inseparable. The memories continued, flashing through his mind in a rush of sound and color. There was the inkling of a plan to storm Whitespire. There was Margo, grinning deviously as she — _(Wait, hold on, did you guys-?) (Is that really important right now, Quentin?)_ — He supposed not. A mental image of a poster, nailed up outside a tavern. The royal wedding had been moved up. Alice’s voice close to Julia’s ear: “Oh, shit.” It was — how long had he been out? 

Quentin dragged his eyes open, slow and painstaking, to look up at Julia. She stood above him, her face solemn, her fingers laid across his brow. “Tomorrow,” she said. “It’s tomorrow.” _Pray you have your strength by then._ She lifted her hand away, breaking the bridge of their minds. 

So that was it, then. They had one more day. One more day to stop the wedding. One more day to stop Reynard. 

~

One more day to save Fillory.

Eliot kept going around humming something Fen didn’t recognize. She guessed it was some kind of nervous habit.

Fen, for her part, was feeling curiously calm. It wasn't that she had become numb or sunken into denial; she knew that the battle to come would be difficult and bloody. Most likely she would lose friends. She would mourn whoever fell. Possibly she herself would die — her life forfeit for the freedom of her people. She understood all of this fully.

It was simply that she wasn't afraid. She knew the dangers, but she had known them from the beginning. From the day she was crowned and taken from her home against her will. From the day she had joined Fillorians United, lying to her father all the while about what kept her out at odd hours. From her teenage years, when she saw friends punished for speaking against Ember's rule; from childhood, when, one summer, Ember demanded all the crops in her village for a feast at the palace; from birth, it seemed sometimes, her mother dead before she ever held her because Ember had shut down the centaur clinic and taken their funds for a statue of himself and no one else knew how to treat her ailments. 

Fen had lived her life in dread of what might happen next, what outlandish toll might be laid upon the kingdom at Ember's whim. But no longer. She knew, now, what was to come, and she was not afraid.

She laced her fingers with Eliot's in the garden and watched the sunset. Patches of light shifted over them like living things as they spoke in hushed tones. The wards at the garden wall and at the tree line beyond would be lifted at dawn. Even now their allies gathered in the shadows.

Eliot was tense beside her, every muscle rigid. She could've used him as a stake for a wayward sapling. She squeezed his hand until he relaxed and looked down at her, the clouds lit pink and orange behind him. He looked as if on fire. For a moment, Fen imagined she smelled smoke. Eliot gave her something that was nearly a smile. "Another day, another destiny," he murmured, wry and half doleful.

Fen nodded, making up the difference his almost-smile left over. "Tomorrow," she said.

Tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so we've probably only got like two chapters left. and i say "probably" because i never really stick to my word on that, so who knows what might happen. not me. either way, one happy ending coming up (eventually)! or maybe two depending on how you're counting


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